Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection
Wesley Smith Interview
Interview number: 53.47
[BEGIN SIDE A]
This is the River Runners Oral History Project, and we're here with Wesley Smith. Dave Edwards is running the camera, and I'm Lew Steiger. This is the Spring Guides Training Seminar, 1994, and we're at Marble Canyon.
Steiger: I guess for starters, we need to go into your background on the river and stuff, and how you got there. But before we even get down to that, what we ought to do is just hear a little bit about your background before you ever hit the river. Where were you born and raised?
Smith: I've got this down pretty good. You know we answer this question a lot with our folks on the river.
I was born in Williams, Arizona, in 1946; lived there all my life, went to high school; hiked up and down the Canyon. I swore when I was a senior in high school I'd never go down there again. I went to college, went to Vietnam, came back from Vietnam, hung out, wasn't ever going to work again in my life. My younger brother worked at a gas station in Williams where ARTA drove through and they filled up their gas trucks. He said, "Hey, my brother's a bum. Will you give him a job?" (laughs) A few weeks later, they came through, Roger Hoagland [spelling ?] had fallen off the back of a boat and broken his ankle, and they needed somebody. So they [said], "Tomorrow, be here, channel-locks, cutoffs." I knew nothing about the river, running it or anything.
I started out on this first trip with these guys and then they asked me to come back, do another trip. I'd done three trips, and on the fourth trip we were unloading the boats at Lee's Ferry, and we were pushing a little too hard at the back, Roger fell off again, rebroke his ankle, and I got to be a boatman and take the boat down. (chuckles)
Now at this time, I knew nothing about boating. I had been down three times, but the trips had to go on, _________, "Hey, you're it." So Louise and myself---now Louise and Roger had been married and Louise, I thought, knew more about the river than I knew---we both would write on our hands all the layers of the Grand Canyon. If someone said, "What layer is that?" And you'd go, "Let me see (consulting hand), it's Tapeats." (laughs) And if you did the dishes too much, you know, then you couldn't really have an orientation or anything. We didn't know how to start the motors, how to fix them. If it wasn't for the people on our trip, being able to repair motors, and for the grace of God, you know, because we actually weren't professionals in those days. We didn't know much about. . . .
Steiger: I thought it was snout boats that you started out with. So these were motor trips?
Smith: Oh yeah, these were motor trips. We just put all the tubes together and a platform up there, chains around it, threw all the gear in the middle, threw a tarp over it, and ropes back and forth, and that was it.
Steiger: So it was a boat similar to the picture of the boat . . .
Smith: Turning over? Yeah. Exactly the same. I had some skills when I first came back from Vietnam of rescue and first aid -sort of like in situations where you don't know what's going on. (chuckles)
Steiger: If it's okay to talk about: when you were over in Vietnam, what was going on? What branch of the Service were you in? What was your job?
Smith: I was in the infantry. I was a private when I got there. I got there about two weeks before the Tet Offensive in 1968. I worked on the Mekong Delta. The company that I went into had 130 men. I left it in eight months and we had gone through 520 men to maintain 130-men strength. There was like 12 people, 6, 2, somebody killed every day. Sometimes hundreds of people stacked up. So I was just really lucky, the way booby traps would misfire, one thing or another. I was there for a few months and then I was in charge of the group that was there. But, you know, the turnover was so fast and everything, that's not very uncommon at all.
So anyway, I got out of there [Vietnam], and I got back to school. I got an early out to go back to college, so I was in a firefight and then I was in a classroom about fifteen days later. And my teachers told me that I couldn't concentrate! (ironic laugh) So I skipped out of education for a while and was just hanging out. And then this great opportunity came. They said, "Hey, come on the river." I have met so many good people down there. The boatmen, working with them, is similar to having the camaraderie like you would have in Vietnam or something like that, where everyone depends on each other, they know what each other is doing, they're working for a common good, "let's keep each other alive, let's help each other out here," and stuff. A lot of the places in the world, you can't find that experience, or you can't work with people -you have to rely on how they are and stuff. But I've found that on the river.
And then on top of that, there's a million people that go down there, and they're all experts in one field or another. You can pick anybody's brain about science, how they [float?] hydrogen, nuclear reactors, medicine, carpentry -anything. And just float down with these people, pick their heads, they pick your head. Wow! You learn everything!
Steiger: How did you get to Vietnam in the first place? Did you get drafted, or what was the deal on that?
Smith: Yeah. I went to school. My skills weren't very good. In fact, they did a study at NAU -I started like in 1964 -and they did a spelling thing of every student in the school. And the dean calls me in and said, "Well, Wesley, someone had to be the worst." (laughs) So I really wasn't into school at that time. It was like something just to do. So I went for about two years, and then they told me that I had to take a year off -got kicked out of school, sort of like, for a year. And about two minutes after you're kicked out of school they send a thing right to the draft board. And like a week later. . . . This inspired a lot of people to stay in school, because the minute you dropped out of school, you're immediately kicked into the draft. And there I was.
Steiger: It wasn't one of these things where you signed up for it, you thought it was a good thing, "God bless America?”
Smith: No, they told me I had to go, because I couldn't make the grades in school. And I could make the grades, I just wasn't interested in it at the time. And it was like, "If you don't do good, you're going to go to Vietnam." The minute I was out of school, just like that (snaps fingers). Everybody in that same era had the same thing occur. The next thing you know, you're in the Army. And then. . . . You know.
Steiger: Well what did you think about all that stuff then, about having to go over there and all that?
Smith: Oh, I was completely ignorant about the whole thing. I got taken into Fort Bliss, and then I got sent to Colorado to basic training. And great, we could ski in the winter and everything. This buddy of mine, Jim Gannon, from Iowa, he said, "Hey, we're going to miss the whole thing! We've got a friend down here that graduated with us. He can send us anywhere we want to go." I said, "Well, where do we want to go?" He said, "Vietnam." "I've been hearing something about that. Do you know anything about it?" "No, let's go there." "Well, you know what, we can get a three-day pass, and we can take off for Thanksgiving. We can be home at Christmas, we can get our thirty days for going overseas. We can have forty-five days off here! And then we'll go to this Vietnam." We went over there like, (humming), "What's going on here?" And we met everyone and we talked and everyone's going, "Yeah, it's pretty casual, not much going on here." Four days later the Tet Offensive started. The North Vietnamese took over every town in South Vietnam. They're dropping 500-pound bombs on hotels in the middle of Saigon. It was a different war from that moment on. And we were so dumb about it, the first day out in the field you say, "Ut-oh, I don't like this. I'm going to go back and I'm going to freak out. I'm going to tell them 'I'm out of here, I'm leaving this place.'" I mean, you call in artillery and stuff, you go in a ditch, you look at someone, you try to pull their arm out, and you get the whole trunk of their body. Their legs are missing, their head's missing. They're telling you, "Dig in the mud," finding stuff, pulling it out, and I'm going, "Whoa! What's going on?!" And kicked ass like that (snaps fingers) every day from then on out. And it's "Whoa! What is happening here?!"
You have two choices: If you freak out, they send you to Long Bin Jail [spelling ?], which is a military prison in Vietnam, where they brutalize and will horrorize American citizens . . . under taxpayer dollars, under the auspice of the federal government. And these kids come back from that place, back to the line. They freak out and say, "Well, send me to jail. I'm not going to fight any more, I'm not going to go out there, I'm not going to kill. I'm not going to do this." And they go "Ha! You're not home, you're in this country and we have a military prison," and they put them in there, shoot them with fire hoses and brutalize them.
Steiger: Americans are doing this?!
Smith: Americans to Americans! These kids come back. . . . And I wanted to take that route, but I saw so many cases of it, and they come back and they're like zombies. Because you go into that prison, the minute you object, your time stops, and however long it takes to break you, you're in there, and then you're coming back. If you were killed in that prison, your body, your paperwork, is shipped to a line unit and you're cranked up there, and they have to pay no attention to anybody.
But anyway, I've seen these kids come back, and they go, "I can't do this, I'm not going to do it," and just stand up like this, (makes shooting sound), to get shot, just to get out of there. You can't kill yourself in an American prison, but they can beat you so much that you will come back like that. So there's no obstinance. There's no way that -once you're over there. If it was in South America or something like that, you could walk home. But you can't swim across. There's nothing that you can do except go out there and say, "Well, I'm going to do what I can do. I'm going to protect my brothers, and I'm going to try to kill as few people as I can, because it's for no reason." You know? We're on their land, we're stomping on it, trying out our weapons and stuff. (ironic chuckle) We left anyway. Has it changed the world? It would have been the same if we had never gone over there, except we wouldn't be missing so many Americans. And we talk about our people that are Missing In Action?! (ironic chuckle) They have hundreds of thousands. You can just see these bombers coming by just blowing these whole towns up. You can't find a piece of anybody for whole square miles! And we think that we need to know accountability?! We do -but they would like some accountability too. And it's splattered all over the whole country. You know, we did some wrong things there. We are dealing with Agent Orange back here, the guys who get sprayed a little bit, working in it. How would you like to be sprayed with it at the same time, year after year, have it on all your trees, in your water system, in your water tables, in all of your food?! You think that they're not going through the shit that we're going through?! It's incredible how irresponsible. . . .
It's sickening that Americans treat Americans like that. And it's sickening that we have no recourse. In the sixties, a lot of people voiced out to stop wars and stuff. But these poor guys over there in the Desert Storm -they're all coming back sick. The government is denying that they have any diseases. Their children are goofed up. The entire thing. . . . And they go, "Hm."
Now this nuclear weapon thing has come up. When I was a kid in Williams, we would go out to the airport and we would set there and we would watch the sky light up as they did the explosions here in Nevada. And we would drive back to Williams, and we would feel the entire town shake. My father owned a drugstore. We also have a big basement in it, so we had civil defense supplies and stuff in it. He would take a Geiger counter, and after it rained, he would go around the aisles, and he could tell where people had come in with radiation.
Steiger: That was in Williams?!
Smith: In Williams, yeah.
Steiger: And that was like in the late fifties?
Smith: Yeah. It was neat! It was an event! Everybody in town would drive out to the airport and set there, a big line of cars. Big explosion in the sky. Come back to Williams and set there and wait: (makes sound of explosion and demonstrates shaking) the shock wave. You could just feel it running across the thing. But the radiation: my dad had a Geiger counter, and he would go daily across the floors and see how much was brought into the store and stuff.
Steiger: So you remember seeing all that shit.
Smith: Yeah.
Steiger: Man oh man!
Smith: I don't know if we got off the subject. (laughs)
Steiger: No, I don't think we did -I really don't. I mean, I had never heard something like that. I don't think we got off track. I had no idea. I don't guess you could. I don't guess there'd be any way.
Smith: In Vietnam, sort of a thing, anyone who's there before you, you respect and you think that they know more than you do, that they know one trick or another. And after I was there for about two-and-a-half months, I was the oldest person there. And all the younger people would look and say, "What do we do?" It's sort of like being a head boatman. I cross-use these skills. It's like, "What do we do?" All you gotta do is. . . . “I don't know what the fuck you do!" and freak out and watch everyone just go in every fuckin' different direction. And you can say, "Ha!" and just use whatever sense you have, you know. Everybody's just right behind you, doing exactly what you say.
Steiger: As long as you were in control.
Smith: Right. And now the thing about it is, I knew that I didn't know anything about it. But, as little as I know about it, I knew ten minutes more of it than they did. And when we started rafting and stuff too, it's the same way: nobody knew about anything. But all you could do was try. You know, we were forced into a lot of situations. We didn't say "we're professionals." You know? "Hey, these trips are going. You want to try this?" And the people more or less knew that they were on an adventure too. They didn't really. . . . Not like nowadays.
Steiger: They didn't expect anything.
Smith: Yeah. It's pretty much canned, you can expect certain things one way or another.
We had a trip that I worked for Jumping Mouse last year. And it started out in a terrible rainstorm up here. We had like four paraplegics, putting them on boats. We have a lot of autistic people, cerebral palsy. They all weathered this, and we just got dumped on and dumped on and dumped on. Then we did a really long day down to MatKat [phonetic spelling], below in there. And in the morning, the head boatman said to the people, "You know, this is really great. You guys didn't complain or anything about this. On a commercial trip right now, if we had done the same thing, everyone would say, 'It's too light, it's too dark.'" The complaints that can come up from nowhere! Like you can really affect anything! And these people, they're all disabled and everything, saw that we were doing the best that we could, that we couldn't affect anything, and they kept a good attitude, and it just worked for everybody. And the head boatman of the trip thanked the people in the morning and said, "If this was a commercial trip, this would be a whole different place here right now."
Steiger: Was that the way it was. . . . Like, how did that very first trip that you did, strike you?
Smith: Oh! It was just like going into the Bible or something! (exclamation of awe) I was looking around, and I thought it was the only time I was ever going to be able to see anything. I looked at it and I went, "Wow, this is just so neat!" I was just so happy to do it. And I never thought that I would be asked back to do it [again] or anything. But somebody wasn't healed, and they said, "Hey, come on. You work good." And, oh, boy, I tell you, it was just incredible. And I'm sure it's like that for everybody. There's places in the Canyon that I haven't gone, that I don't go, that I save for special events.
Steiger: How long had you been back from Vietnam before you got on the river?
Smith: About a year-and-a-half.
Steiger: So you were still in pretty good shape and all that.
Smith: Yeah.
Steiger: And what were the passengers like on that first trip?
Smith: Oh, they were so supportive. Me and Louise were there, and we were both looking at each other, and I'm going, "Louise knows everything," and she's going, "Wesley knows everything." And between the two of us (laughs), we'd bounce it back and forth. But I tell you, the motors, we used to have those shear pins in. And the amount of driftwood in the river was just all the time! Just about the time you're going into Crystal or something (makes sound of buzz saw, then a crash). You're pulling up the motor, trying to pull out the cotter key. We'd drop more props and channel locks in the river than you could shake a stick at. And trying to get it back on, getting it up there, and then trying to crank the sucker before you get into the hole! The guy that trained me, Hugh Wingfield and Dave Hosenbrock [phonetic spellings] and his wife: you would just go. . . . When the motor would go out, we'd just go ahead and get up on top of that load and set there with everybody else. (laughs) And Georgie would say, "Here we go!" (exclamation of panic) Like, "Well, here's my pliers, I'm not going to be down there fiddling with that." You know, like, you get it changed, you're going to be out of there before it's anything.
But I was paranoid. I tell you, I've taken people down, and I can teach them how to read the river or something, and I can see them go to sleep some. I didn't go to sleep for probably the first nine years. I'd hear one little thing, I'm going, "Ut-oh, ut-oh." And some people say, "Well, you feel very comfortable with us now?" I said, "Yes," because I think I've been stuck in here every possible way you can, and I know how to get off of it. "Okay, this is where we're going to end up, and this is how we get off."
Steiger: This is Crystal you're talking about? Or any of them?
Smith: Every one. Every rock that you can possibly get screwed up on. I've been there, or I've seen somebody there, I think.
Steiger: Did we get it down what year it was that you first went?
Smith: In 1970.
Steiger: I'm trying to remember how it was different then, just physically, the place.
Smith: Oh, we used to come into camp, your stove thing would just be like. . . . You'd go and dig like this and make a pit. Get four stones, put the two rails across, throw a thing down, all the chicky pails [dishwater] all the food. Camping on. . . . And just in the morning, just leaving the firepit, just pulling your things out and leaving it. All the beaches were just cluttered with all these different little campfire things.
Steiger: Had to get your wood before you camped.
Smith: (laughs) Oh, the river was so full of wood that it was (sarcasm) like a problem! And you get to the back of Lake Mead, and you try to get to Pierce's Ferry, all the way across the river, like for a quarter of a mile, just logs, logs, logs. You have people out on the front of the boat with big sticks, going like this. No slip clutches, just. . . . (ching, ching) Along with having an Allen wrench today, and duct tape, a box of shear pins. Nah! They were gold to trade. When Mercury [marine motor company] came out with that thing, what a blessing, boy! [the invention of the slip-clutch] The bosses liked it too -it started saving them money. (laughs) I'd run those things up.
Steiger: Was there a clear-cut shift between motoring and rowing?
Smith: More or less, the major change came. . . . I'd worked for about three years. The Park Service started this rumor that they were going to change the jurisdiction in the Canyon and that the companies should convert to rowing, because they were going to try to outlaw motor things. All the companies that were working, worked on the motor boats. So some of the companies believed that rumor and some of them didn't. It's come to pass to prove that motorboats are going to be down in the Canyon. They've had this discussion, they've done all these impact studies and everything. But when they first started the rumor and invited the companies to convert into rowing, AZRA started developing a rowing program down in the Grand Canyon where there was mostly bigger boats or dories. At that time they brought a lot of the California crew out: Don Briggs, Melville, all those guys that knew how to row boats and stuff, they brought them out here. At that time we were rowing basket boats, light boats from off of life boats -round circles and stuff.
Steiger: They had those "roll bars." (laughs)
Smith: Yeah. First step, we'd cut them off of them. Jerry Jordan cut the bottom off of one (laughs) in Havasu one day. Collapsed the whole thing. And then the Wynn [spelling ?] brothers, who were great stallions in the AZRA company, they came on-line. And then Peter Wynn started developing this snout design, and we went through about three generations of frames with those. When we started rowing them, nobody knew how to row them, nobody knew a catamaran system or anything. You can teach somebody like this something right now, in a day. But when you're trying to figure it out, you know, like we'd come back to work that year and someone'd go, "I know how we get in that eddy! Let's aim our tubes toward the eddy, and then we'll just power into it!" Instead of, like, getting broadside and just letting the current go and trying to make it across. We tried everything. We used to work twice as hard. Every year, you'd come back to work, it gets easier and easier. "Ah, ah, ah." Now, proper boating and how to use techniques and everything, it's so commonplace, because everybody shares this information.
This is the only other thing that I wanted to make a statement about: In Vietnam, we shared every secret that we knew with every other person, because we knew that eventually it could save our lives. In the river community, in a lot of jobs where you have an apprenticeship, like making shoes, making gold, making whatever -pharmacy -a lot of those things can go slow. In the river business, everybody has to share their knowledge with everybody, and that way we can all stay safe. If you're an old boatman and you know some secrets, and you see a young person come along, and if you keep that information from him, sure as shit, your ass is going to be in a sling one day: You'll be going down (makes sound of getting in trouble), "I wonder if I told him about. . . ." [Meaning, "I wonder if I told him about this little piece of information that's going to save my butt right now."]
This is a place some people have tried to interpret river running and stuff as like being snobbish and the old people have this and that. But I think the information of keeping each other safe, and being able to provide every bit of knowledge to every person. . . . That way we can really take care of the people and we can take care of each other. And I really hate it when -and I've worked with companies overseas in different places to where boatmen have been, (in a snobbish tone) "Excuse me." They're very cliquish. They will watch and they will know something that's going to happen at a rapid, and they won't advise me of that beforehand. And they will be telling the people on their boat, "Watch this! (laughs)" And set you up to make mistakes, and to not share knowledge, and to be so concerned that if they don't keep this knowledge, they won't keep their job. None of us are going to keep our jobs -we're all filtering through, you know.
Steiger: Well, you didn't encounter that stuff here in the Canyon, did you?
Smith: Ahhhh, I have. This is human nature. It's something that we all just have to say, "Hey, this is what we're going to do, or we're going to work away from." Because it's youth, it's misunderstanding, it's egoism. It's just those things. And those things are going to exist forever. Just knowing that you can say, "Hey, if I know a secret, I'd better tell this person that secret, because this is. . . ." You know, like how to work a carabiner, how to do anything. If everyone's cross-educated with anything pertaining to safety. . . . But I have worked on rivers with people, and on this river. And I've seen people, if the head boatman has an attitude. . . . Anybody can make of a trip what they want to. But it doesn't get you anywhere to do that.
Steiger: To make it bad, yeah.
Smith: In other places where I've worked ___________. Because I take somebody, and I know a new person is going down the river, I'll say, "Watch out for this one." Like at the bottom of Nankoweap, like that rock that's there. Like, row one way or another. Or someplace, you know, like where you get hung up. Say, "Hey, you might want to go right or left or something like that." Just the basic courtesies, you know. And then sometimes you go somewhere and everyone's just rowing off from you, and you _______. It's good to know the river yourself, but it's [better] if every boatman supports each other and shares all that information.
Steiger: Have you run a bunch of other rivers all over the place?
Smith: I worked in Africa with Dave Edwards and Kevin, for a few [months?] on the Zambezi.
Steiger: ___________________.
Smith: Yeah. I just did the lower part between the falls and Sangue [phonetic spelling]. Then we went up to Tanzania and did the Rafigi [phonetic spelling] through the Zulu Game Reserve. I've done most of the ones here in Arizona, San Juan and those guys. We went to Thailand and we did some in bamboo boats -crazy bamboo boats. Walked through all of the poppy fields up to this place, ride on elephants for a day, and then they take you to a place where they have a mill downstream for the bamboo, and they have no way to get it there. But the dumb tourists come through, so they take all of these great big, like, eighteen-, twenty-two-foot pieces of bamboo, and thrash them together about nine foot wide, and they build a little tripod out on there, and we all get on board, and tie your packs onto it. They give you a pole, and you start taking off down this river. Kevin Johnson's got, this limb comes like that, just knocks him off the boat. It's incredible: some places you come to corners where there's hundreds of these boats that are all just smashed or making a sieve around this corner. You might lose everything, but they don't tell you this. [You're lucky] to get away with your life. And then finally you get down to this place and you see a saw mill there, and you've just brought in the new load of logs! (laughter) Just carve them up there, and say, "Here, Josh, here's your bus again." (laughter) We didn't even have to do it ourselves -we got paid to let these guys do it! And it's totally out of control. Nobody knows what's going on. There may be one guy, and he's yelling, running from boat to boat.
Steiger: Well, I guess the Canyon, we were a little more under control then, when all that started.
Smith: We did have some good advisors. Everybody really supported each other. We went through a lot of phases to where, like now we have the radio communication. Our evacuation stuff and everything is so top-of-the-line compared to what it used to be.
Steiger: For you, what's the job of being a guide in the Grand Canyon, all about?, if you had to put your finger on it. And have you seen that change since the time that you started?
Smith: Yeah, I've seen it change. It's just like growing up. Have you noticed that you've grown up in the last ten years?
Steiger: Yeah.
Smith: Different sides look different? It happens so casually that you don't notice it anyway. It's just what you do.
Steiger: Like what did you see? What would have been the job description in the seventies? If somebody had just said, "Okay, what's your job here? What's the point of it?"
Smith: They just say, "Okay now, take care of those folks, and we'll see you at the other end." Whatever it entails! (laughs) You have to know how to start an engine, to cook food, to do first aid, to lead hikes, to interpret natural history and geology -all of those things come very slowly, especially for me. A lot of people take off with degrees and stuff and have studied stuff, but almost everything that I know has been taught to me by the passengers. One of them will be reading a book. . . . And I bring a lot of books. After lunch, I pass them out and someone reads, "Oh look, it says right here. . . " that we're going past this or that. And I'll [think], "Hm, I'll remember that."
Steiger: You mean almost everything you know about the river has been taught to you by the passengers? The interpretive stuff?
Smith: Oh, all the geology, all the faults, all of the plants. I knew it all, but like names and how, sequence and everything. And I just listen to them read and discuss back and forth. I have no formal training on any of this. And if there's anything I can't think of, I go, "How does that go together? I understand that and that, but this here. . . ." And then all of a sudden a geologist will come on your boat, and you go, "Well, now, explain that to me." He explains that to you, and then all of a sudden, you know everything. Except when you go on a trip with Larry.
Steiger: Stevens?
Smith: Oh yeah. (laughter) He does everything ______________. I just got the five things down okay, I don't need to know. . . . Because he can tell you not only what bug it is, but what kind of fleas are on its shoulder and what kind of parasites are on it.
Steiger: So, like, when you started out, that's what you did -you wrote the names of the rocks on your hand?
Smith: Yeah. Knew nothing! Never heard of river running, never knew of it. My brother said to me, "I can get you a job on the river." I said, "Well, what are we doing?" I thought it was like coal barges or something like that. He said, "No, you take people down on boats on vacation." I said, "Uh-huh. Where were they?" And when I remember the Grand Canyon -we used to hike down before the dam -underneath the bridge there at Phantom Ranch, where the nice little lagoon and stuff is, there used to be these big sand dunes, and it used to be that real silty mud. And in Boy Scouts we used to go down there. And they had apple orchards all up there, apricots. We would get in the trees.
Steiger: At Phantom Ranch?
Smith: Yeah. But we'd go out on those mud dunes, and we'd wiggle in the mud, and just like that, you would start sinking. And the last time I played on one of those things, I got in it, and I got about to here, and everyone started laughing. And then I got down to here, and I got up to here. And there was like about nine kids trying to pull me back out. And it took like about two hours, just pulling the mud and everything out. And I finally got back out on the beach, and I'm going, "Yeah! You'd better take off running!" Uh! it was the worst experience of my life -almost -getting stuck in that mud.
And we all used to go down a little bit further, but once you get down so far, you know, you just. . . . The agitation and everything, you just start going down, and then everyone realized how serious it was. I was spitting out mud at times. How they got me back out is amazing.
Steiger: So that's like late fifties or something?
Smith: Yeah, anywhere in the sixties. I graduated in 1964. But we went down there: every Boy Scout group, every church group, every graduating group. I mean, you walked up and down that Canyon so damned much that you just [got] tired of it. It wasn't like "fun," like going out to the woods. It's like, "You guys are going to go somewhere this weekend." "Oh, far out. Let's go to Phoenix. I hear they have a TV down there. They have swimming pools." They would entice us to walk to the bottom of the Grand Canyon to swim in the swimming pool that they had there. And we'd swim in the swimming pool, but we wouldn't get in the creek. We wouldn't get in the river. I mean, that was. . . . But the swimming pool! "Yeah, let's go!"
Steiger: So you weren't totally sold on the Boy Scouts then?
Smith: No. This is just some things our scoutmaster did: "You guys don't want to take any canned foods." So we'd open up the cans and we'd dump everything into plastic bags and put them in your pack, you know. And then you get down there and then it's all a big mush, and he was calling you dummies, you know. You go, "How about a little bit of leadership here?" (chuckles) We get up to the rim, and it's like before the light even comes up, and we're all ready to go. "I wanna sleep!" "A-ha! It's noon. Let's go!" But you know, it wasn't. . . . It was just. . . . We didn't know what we were doing. You know, nobody did, and nobody wants professional hikers. Nowadays, it's so easy to take a group of people, knowing what we know and everything -like to prepare them, to get them hydrated, tell them how to pack and everything. We can move a group of people back and forth so effortlessly, and be fully protected with everything.
I even got to -AZRA spotted me money to raise homing pigeons. This was before we had radios. They gave me $150 allowance and I bought six pairs of pigeons at Phoenix and I had a cage here. And I raised them for like five years. Now, the first wave of pigeons that I had, the ones that I paid twenty-five bucks for, we would take them, after I had gone for three years, and they would retrieve from the Grand Canyon back to Williams. They could make it back within an hour. But these pigeons were sort of retards. They would sit on the boats. We would have them in apple crates and stuff. And when we let them go, we'd have to throw rocks at them to make them go home!
Steiger: What was the idea? When would you send them? Would you take them down there and just report in "everything's okay"?
Smith: No, like if we had an accident, if we needed a helicopter or we needed. . . .
Steiger: You'd take this pigeon with you?
Smith: Three, on each trip.
Steiger: And how would you care for them? This was on motor trips, or rowing trips?
Smith: Oh, on rowing trips too, yeah. And they loved just sitting right there and getting splashed and stuff. But then there was a settlement down in Phoenix where this guy who died has this pigeon club: he had these babies he was selling for $150 a piece, and he gave me twenty-two of them. So then I went another three years, and we had these pigeons, they could get back to Williams within fifteen minutes from anywhere in the Grand Canyon. I took them to Cortez in a windstorm that was going that way, and they made it back to Williams within six hours, the first ones did. Very dedicated, the minute you let them go, just straight up and straight home. But then radios and stuff came in. I wasn't protecting the pigeons well. One of them, ring-tailed cats got into their cage, killed one, ________and stuff.
Steiger: But you carried them down there in a cage on the boat?
Smith: Yeah, we did for a few years there.
Steiger: ______________________.
Smith: This is amazing: once we started carrying them, we didn't have any accidents! I think the most important message we ever sent out was, "Hike a guitar into Phantom Ranch." Becca was on the trip. But we never got to make any saves with them, but we did it. When I first started taking them, for a long time they didn't do anything. And then Tom Workman got appointed up here, and he classified them as pets and then I had to go before a tribunal of the National Park and explain to them what we were doing. They didn't want anything released down there that would stay down there. But we let them go three at a time, usually one white one, you know, like, one for the peregrines, one to get lost, and the other one to get home. The first group that I had, these guys, they loved the river, man. They're homing pigeons, but they don't mind living on your gypsy wagon, you know. We throw them up in the air, they'd start flying off, and then they'd follow us for a while. And then they would land on a motorboat and someone would just walk over to them. They had these little cylinders on their leg, you take the note out, sign your name, tell them what it was, throw them back in the air. Finally they get bored and they go home. But the last ones worked.
Steiger: Sounds like it was a pretty colorful outfit back in those days. Edwards, what questions should we be asking here? (pause)
Smith: . . . and I didn't have it connected! (laughter) He was so mad! He said, "You get any pictures? Tell everybody I did that."
Edwards: Tell us about the first time you ever got bit by a snake.
Smith: Oh, snake stories! I was at this camp one time -it's right above Hance Rapid. I'm not sure the mileage. But anyway, we're having a party in this camp, and we had set the john way up around the corner. This young guy comes into the camp and says, "Wesley, I want to talk to you." I thought, "Oh my God, what have I done now?" So I go off to the side of the camp with him, and he goes, "I don't want to ruin the party or anything, but I've just been bitten by a snake." "Sit down!" (laughter) We had a few doctors on the trip and everything and they advised us more or less what's going on. This guy got bit probably around 8:00 at night, and we sent somebody with a radio up this way, and we sent a boat going downriver, and we dropped somebody off at Hance with a mirror. By 8:00 in the morning the thing had been reported like four times, so they stopped at every place coming up the river to finally rendezvous with us. I set up with this guy at night. I asked him, "What does it feel like?" "Well, it's just a little numbness in my finger here." His finger just started getting fatter and fatter. All of a sudden, his whole hand got fatter. So every hour we would draw a line around it and we would measure and mark the progression.
Steiger: That's you just taking vitals?
Smith: Yeah, I took vitals all night long. At first when it happened, all the doctors and everybody came over and they said, "Hey, we can give him pain relief." The first thing I had the guy do was drink a lot of water. I've had people who've gone into anaphylactic shock over scorpions or anything. But right after they get bit, have them get as much water on board as they can hold, because what you're going to experience is, as their twitches and that stuff go on, they aren't going to be able to drink water, they're not going to be able to hold it down, they're going to drool. And more or less what you get on board right at the beginning is all that you're going to be able to get in. You can encourage them, but they can't take oral medicines or anything. "Start slamming some water." And I set up with this guy. The doctors and everyone set up, and I go, "Well, you know, more or less what's been done is going to be done." Since he had hiked down from the mountain, it had been a few minutes and everything, we chose not to cut right at the site. It's very dangerous, and it only is just to be the skin on the top so that the poisons can come out. And I'll tell you later about this. But we laid him down, put his arm just about chest level, and then just tried to make him comfortable. We gave him Benadryl. You can have any kind of pain relievers, because it's going to be a throbbing pain -except like Percodan has aspirin in it. When a rattlesnake bites you, what it's doing is, breaking down the red blood cells. And aspirin makes you bleed and everything too, so you don't want to do that. But Percocets, anything with Tylenol, and demerol, tylox, anything like that you can use -but nothing that has aspirin in it, because that's going to accentuate the problem.
Steiger: How did you learn all this stuff? Did you have medical training?
Smith: Yeah, I went through like a medical training in Vietnam, got to practice a lot. And then I've done first aid, because I've always worked at ski areas in the winter. And then I went through the EMT program about three times, and then I went through the I-EMT program in the Flagstaff medical center, and drove an ambulance outside of Williams, between Kingman, Grand Canyon, and Flagstaff for about six years -and just picking everybody's brain about it, because I have to deal with this stuff, and there's questions I need to know. So I ask every doctor, "Hey, do you know anything about this that I don't know?" and get everybody's opinion.
Anyway, this guy goes, "Oh! Oh!" He's just screaming. They said, "You can give him two #3 Tylenols every four hours." And he said, "It feels sort of like one of those things that presses the roads, the big ones, is running over my arm, but it's going very slow and it just keeps moving up and up and up."
Now this guy was at the toilet, by himself, with the toilet paper down here at night. He reached down for the toilet paper and his fingers dangling, the snake was there looking for a mouse or something. So it did a silent bite.
Steiger: Didn't rattle?
Smith: When it doesn't rattle, and if it's striking like at little fingers or something like that, you know that you've got a good injection of the stuff, and this guy did. We got him out of there in the morning, and it was just going right here for his shoulder. I said, "Well, it might work out and you can come back in." He got to the Flagstaff hospital and his entire body bloated up like this. He was like the Michelin man, in bed for about seven or eight days. So I'd seen it work, and I'd seen the progression of it, and I could see about -I knew what kind of dose he had. We went back up and found the rattlesnake and suffocated it and sent it along with him, because they were doing some research studies at Tucson, __________ [on venom?] and stuff. So anyway, I'd seen this work, and I knew about how fast it was going and everything.
Now, I've been handling rattlesnakes for a long time. I've picked hundreds of them up. We camped at that camp right across from Deer Creek, and this one comes right out -it's a very small camp, anyway -we're getting rained on, everyone has their tents up -and this guy comes out from underneath this rock. (startled cry) And all the people are running around and everything. And I go, "Well, I'll help him out. I'll capture and take him out of here, because he's going to come out sometime during the night. No one can walk around here, he's weirded-out and everything." So I did like I usually do, I picked him up, and I have him. I've picked up snakes and I've choked them too hard and I set them down and they're a little dizzy. So I promised myself that I wouldn't hurt this snake. So I got his tail in this hand and I've got his head like this, and I've got the flashlight in my mouth, and I'm walking him up the hill to the back. And I go, "Gosh, I don't want to squeeze on that guy, I'll give him a little bit of a break." So I put my finger down like this, and over the top you can see, and he unledges his head and comes and strikes me right there. And I can see him going for this, and I go "Ooo-ooo" pulling on his tail, you know. And I looked, and I got one little tiny bead of blood right there, and I go, "You son-of-a-bitch! Do you know what kind of problems this is going to cause me?! You'd better tell all your friends they'd better not bite me any more." I take him over to the side of this sandy bank and throw him down. So it's just right there and I have this razor-sharp knife. I cut it just a little bit and sucked. Now, you see, if I'd have got any venom or anything, I would have tasted a little metallic taste or something in my mouth. I didn't get any of that. It just was one, and he just barely even started to get it in there before I had him straight again. So then I go, "Okay, now this is how this is going to be. . . . Shit, going back and telling your boatman friends and everybody you've been bit by a snake. Everyone's going to freak out." So I went back and I packed my bag to go out, straightened out my ammo box, did all these things -because I knew I'd done everything for it that could be done -and got all my shit squared away, and then I went up to my buddies and I said, "Hey, you guys, I've got to tell you a secret. Now, you're going to have to promise me one thing, if I tell you this secret, you let me be the landlord over it. Okay?" "Yeah." "Okay." "Now, tell us! tell us!" "Now, this is really big-time!" "Okay! What?" "I've just been bitten by a snake." (screams) (laughter) Everybody's all ___________________. "Wait a minute, you guys, it's not that big a deal. I mean, it just hurts. I know what to do. Just don't freak out, I've got everything squared away." "We promise we won't tell anybody." Two minutes later, every doctor is over there! (laughs) You get all this attention right off the bat, because people think when it bites you it's like an alligator or something like that. You don't even feel anything. And you're not, for a while. You've got some time to make some moves, get your attitude together, pump some water, find some shade, lay down, (chuckles) write your will in your diary. You've got some time to do that stuff. But people don't know that if they haven't been bitten or haven't seen somebody bitten. But anyway, everyone sets up with you for a while, but then the night goes on, and the thing that I saw was, my arm was swelling up, but it was going so much slower than this other person's. And I go, "Alright! I know how much I've got, and it's going to be okay." It only got up about this big. And during the night, the thing that gave me more pain was shaking it like this. I'd go down to the riverside and people would set up ____________. But eventually everyone goes to sleep. Just go down by the river and (groans and moans), and you start moaning and shaking and all the pain goes away. And then all of a sudden someone will wake up to take a pee and they hear you or see you and run up to you, "Are you okay?" And you stop for a second, "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." Then it starts hurting again.
Steiger: Why were you shaking it? Just to shake it down?
Smith: I don't know, it just gave me comfort, just to move it like that, and to moan out loud. I could set there like this and just. . . . It'd just be throbbing. (moans) It would just be fine, but it sounded terrible. I'll bet it scared people to look at it. But in the morning, it was more or less gone. "I don't need to go out." But these doctors -we had another trip that was coming down, they had like thirty-five doctors on it, and they were doing emergency medicine and everything. And they came over and said, "Hey, you're stupid if you don't go out." That tiny little divot right there is the only necrosis that I have. But they said, "Since it's in your finger, it could go. . . ." The antivenin, before, they said you have to have it within twelve hours. And they go, "No, you can have it in thirty-six hours. Go on out! Go for the treatment and everything." So then that afternoon they called a helicopter, I got a ride out, got to the clinic and the doctor said, "We can't give you antivenin." I said, "Hey, thirty-five doctors on the river just told me I could." He called up Tucson [Poison Control Center] and they said, "Yeah, give it to him." So they gave it to me, and then they sent me to a bone surgeon in Flagstaff, Luicki [phonetic spelling], to make sure that the vein [snake's fang] didn't go through the bone, and put anything in the marrow. The thing ended up costing about $35,000 to Industrial Comp and to AZRA and everybody. So they told me I wasn't allowed to pick up any more snakes.
Steiger: How could it cost that much?
Smith: Oh, helicopter ride out -which is not that much -and the surgeon, and I don't know. I know I got spanked severely for it. They told me, "You can move snakes and stuff, but you gotta use a stick or a bucket or something. You can't personally put your hands on them any more." That's okay! (laughs) I don't want to!
Steiger: Do you have a favorite river story?
Smith: Gosh, not really. There's one that brings to mind: When Chris Brown -we were taking paddle boats, we'd take like a little Redshank or something like that. . . .
Steiger: That was Chris Brown?
Smith: Christopher Brown, yes. He was running with us. And we almost all made the turn to the right-hand side in Crystal, and he wrapped a snout boat on it. They were trapped out there on the rocks.
Steiger: _________________________
Smith: Right on the very tip of the island. (Technical snafu with video tape, Wes is asked to start his story again.) The question proposed to me was, Did I have any outstanding events or anything happen, so I'm going to tell you about this one that happened in Crystal Rapid with myself, Chris Brown, and I'm not sure who the other boatmen were. But all the snout boats make it to the right hand side, except for Chris. He lands it right up on the island. We were carrying at that time -paddleboating wasn't done in the Grand Canyon, especially not at those big water levels or anything -and we had this little Redshank that we had pulled up and we would take it out on calm sections and stuff, but we never did any major rapids or anything with it. They're stuck out there, the water's coming up, and the boat's getting sunk underwater. We can't do anything for them. So I drafted about six of the youngest kids on the trip. From the bottom boat we found a big log, we tied it on there like a dead animal on sticks, and we walked all the way up to the top of the rapid. There were some private trips coming through, and we asked them -they had Avons and they had boats that they could do it, but nobody had the skill. They said, "No, we can't get out there and get in that backwash and rescue those people. It'd be insane to do that." And with our skills nowadays, any one of us would go out there and we could do this routinely. But at this time, we didn't know it. And so I got all these kids, we all carried this boat all the way up to the top. We begged these people, they wouldn't go out there, they wouldn't lend us their boats, so we loaded up, and the six of us, we got right out on the tongue, and we drifted right down, pulled in an eddy, picked four of these people up. . . .
Edwards: With paddles?
Smith: With paddles. And these kids didn't know how to paddle. I didn't know how to paddle captain. We didn't know if we were going to turn over when we hit the eddy fence or anything. But we said, "What else can we do?" And we got six of them, and then we got back out into the current, made it over to the side at the bottom, carried it back up, and we got the other people just as the water was coming right up to the top of the rocks, and we got them back. The water completely pulled the entire snout boat underneath the river. And we're walking back, and the people said, "What are we going to do about that boat?" (laughs) I said, "We're going to go on with our trip. We're going to do whatever. We'll just leave it here. It's recreational equipment." (laughs) And just at that point, the whole boat popped back up, came out and floated right down beside us, right into the eddy we were in. We camped in the eddy that night, half of us laying, sleeping upside down on that boat, all the other boats harbored together, and passed food around. I set the porta-potty up at one end. The next morning, we got up in a crack, got some ropes, set up a pulley system, turned it over, went on our way again. But these young kids, and for us having no paddling experience -in those days, we weren't set up, we didn't have pulley systems, we didn't have enough long ropes, we didn't have carabiners, we didn't have the knowledge of how to pull things off. And everybody coming right together. . . .
Steiger: Were you leading that trip?
Smith: Yeah, I think I was.
Steiger: And you made two trips?
Smith: Yeah. (laughs) And some of the passengers. . . . (laughs) Because we got out there and I would start screaming and yelling at these kids just like they were in the army or something, and we'd get back to shore and the parents would say, "You've got to take it easy on that person, maybe he. . . ." I said (yelling like a drill sergeant), "Get up out of the bottom of the boat! Pull, pull!" (laughs) And we were all just scared to death. We didn't know what was going to happen. At the very least, we'd have to take a swim. But it worked out fine. Seeing so many people pull together -in the old days, it seemed to be more and more. Nowadays, it seems like when something happens, everyone looks around and expects you to know what to do -and we do! (chuckles) But when everyone looked around and they go, "We don't expect anyone to know how to do this. Let's all help out on this, let's all support the people." That kind of stuff. It isn't as much there nowadays as it used to be. That's that story!
Steiger: What were the passengers like? What were the people like that were out on that rock?
Edwards: Wasn't there a blacksmith on that trip that helped pound the frame back into shape?
Smith: Oh! Yeah!
Edwards: Tell him about that guy.
Steiger: Just for details, I wonder what the passengers were like who were stuck.
Smith: We had housewives, kids. When I first started river running, it was like a lot of professionals: a lot of doctors, a lot of people who could afford it. Then as it sort of moves like another ten years, we started getting housewives, janitors -normal people used to be able to afford it. There was a period when you'd get all outdoorsy people, like yuppies people who are into "getting into" the wilderness. But nowadays you can have people who've saved up. You don't have to be particularly rich.
And what we had on this trip was a cross-section of everything: we had a few professional people, but we had just regular, normal people, overweight people, children. There was this stacked across the board. Nobody was accountants.
Steiger: (aside about rocking and blanket in background) But you don't remember specifically who it was that was stuck out on the rock?
Smith: Oh, I have a whole set of pictures. There was somebody on the shore that just took [pictures one right after the other with a motor drive camera], and they sent them to me. I could give them to you if you want to go with this. Because there's a frame-by-frame of us going out there and doing it, and there's all of the people's names and everything. Names have always been my worst suit, and I think it's getting worse than better. It's terrible when you go to some ski area or something like that and you set down and someone skis up next to you and they say, "I would have recognized you if you had an oar in your hand," or something. In fact, I sat with one of your nieces or something on a chairlift. Remember me telling you this?
Steiger: Who would that have been?
Smith: I don't know. She said, "Oh, you work on the river?"
Steiger: My cousin.
Smith: Yeah. And I told her, "Yeah, I work on the river." She said, "Oh, one of my cousins works there, Lew Steiger." And I said, "What a small world!" But they always remember your name, and I never remember their names.
Steiger: That's me too. And then you get these ones that really stick out in your memory, whether you remember their names or not. You remember kind of certain things about them.
Smith: I had some guys come down on a trip -there were six of them and they were all on the Harvard rowing team. This one guy said he was going to be a teacher at this girls' college: Wesleyan [I think he means Wellesley, it's closer to Boston], or something. So I got a chance, I was in Boston, at this regatta, and there all the ships are doing everything and I'm walking across this field with thousands of people, and I go, "Oh, I know someone who works here!" Just like that, I thought of his name. The next person I saw, he was right there. I said, "Matt! How you doing?" (laughs) _____________ said we'd never thought we'd see each other again or anything. I thought of his name just about a second before I saw him.
Steiger: Well, what do you think Edwards? What do you think Wesley? You've got to have another one.
Smith: Well, the greatest story: I took my mom down on a river trip. Now this has given me a lot of tolerance for dealing with anybody. We were like the second day or so, and we're to House Rock, and you know how cold the water can be there and everything. Everyone's washing their hair, and my mom says, "I think I'll wash my hair, Wesley." I said, "Fine, go ahead, wash your hair." And she said, "Warm some water." And I go, "Ha! What do you mean?" She said, "Warm some water." I said, "Mom, people just go down to the beach." [And she said authoritatively], "Wesley!" "Yes, ma'am." (chuckles) And I warmed some water for her. (laughs) Since then, I've done it for myself, we do it for anybody. But having my mom on a trip was just incredible. The shit that you go through for your mom and you don't think anything about it, and then you see somebody else and you go, "Well, if I can go through this with one person, why can't I go through it with everybody? Treat everybody just like they're normal."
Edwards: Like your mom.
Smith: I took her up to Havasu Falls -she's overweight, she hadn't hiked or anything -we made it all the way up, nine miles. She goes, "Okay, I'd better start back, my arthritis is kicking up." Her legs were swelling up. She can only walk like little Chinese [steps]. I said, "No, sit down, sit down." It continued to happen.
So I was head boatman on the trip again, and we started walking back, and we didn't make it back until way late at night. I had to leave her about three miles from up, go down and tell everyone, "Hey, we're doing an emergency camp." We're camping on all the ledges and everything there. It's fine. I said, "Hey, fuck it, man, it's my mom. I'm not leaving without her!" (laughs) She kept walking all that night. She finally got back. She set on the boat for the next three days, smiling. She was real proud of herself, for doing it and everything. But I got . . . gosh, you know. And I didn't think anything about it. Now, if I have a passenger that's lost up there or slow or anything, I don't think anything about it. I just say, "Hey, this is how it's going to have to happen," you know. Treat this person like you would treat your own parents. The only thing was, everyone would make jokes of me -you know, like we all do, about this or that. No one could make a joke in front of my mom. She'd stand up for me! (laughter) Everyone would go, "Wow!" Even the passengers, they knew not to say anything derogatory or anything about my mom being like that, and I'd be behind them, and we'd all be laughing as soon as she turned her back. But I said, "Mom! Chill out! Like, people can make jokes!" "They can't in front of me! I won't stand for that shit!" (laughter)
Steiger: Oh man!
Smith: We camped under the ledges there at Rider Canyon at the bottom, when there used to be a nice sand beach in there. And the ring-tailed cats must have just had some babies or something, and we had locked all the garbage and everything up. So AZRA had these striped sleeping bags at the time -all these different colors, and you could just see like about twelve people lined up here like this. The ringtailed cats just wouldn't quit! They'd start their chatter, they'd knock a few things over, and people would get up and turn on their flashlights. Then they'd get on one side and they'd just run back and forth across all the sleeping bags. My mom would wake me up, "What's that just ran over us?" So I'd count how many there are, you know, and I go over to the stove and I get six pork chops and I throw them out on the ground. "Well, the last time they ran over, they all had a piece of meat in their mouth!" Give them all one and they go home. But it was just running back and forth. They'd get in the bushes and they'd start that chatter, and someone thinks, "Oh my God, it's a snake! It's a snake!" "No. We just put our garbage away too good tonight here. We'll open it up, they'll leave you alone."
Steiger: ___________________ bribe them to go away.
Smith: When they get what they want, then they're out of there. That skunk that used to have Pancho's patio, that skunk used to come into camp. I have a friend in Williams, Ted Fitzpatrick: he's on his sleeping bag with a sheet over him, and this skunk comes in there, pushing his nose all the way down like this, and he just scoots off to the side and sees the skunk. The skunk has got into people's packs, they have jerky or something in it, and they get up and they have tug of wars with him, and he never sprayed anybody. One day we came in, we set our table up, all the people are like this, and it's like real early in the afternoon. He jumps off the wall and he just starts going like this. "Mad skunk! Mad skunk!" He starts coming towards the table. This guy is really hungry. They've got a steak, throw it to him, he runs straight to get it, and he's out of there. But he visited that place for so long, and he had so many encounters with people, stealing stuff from them and they'd wake up with his little nose sniffing them. I don't know what ever happened to him, but he never sprayed anybody. But he would be very bold, and after a few years, he would just come right in and say, "Hey, guys, I can't wait until after darkness -I need it now." (laughs) And he'd come in and just sit. Everybody didn't panic and start throwing rocks at him and stuff.
That's the other thing about snakes: We got on the boats one day after leaving Ledges Camp, and this guy's motoring along. . . . We'd seen a rattlesnake on the ledge over there in the morning by the waterfall. Someone reported it, and everyone goes over and they look at it. Then we leave it and we're going to Havasu. That guy goes, "God damn, those snakes don't rattle much, do they?" "Yeah, they rattle." And he said, "But it's hard to get their attention, isn't it?" And I go, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, I went over there and I couldn't make him rattle, so I picked up this rock and threw it and I hit him with it, he moved back and everything -he still didn't rattle. I even pick up this great big one and I smashed it right on him, just right in two. He still wouldn't rattle at me." I said, "You son of a bitch!" He said, "What do you have to do to make them rattle?" I said "You don't have to pick up a boulder and drop it on them." If I'd known he'd done that, I'd have taken him back there and I would have given him a good rattle with that thing. He just didn't know them. People who come up from the city, they don't see something, or if they want a reaction out of it, they want a picture, they don't know how to get it to rattle -you know, like hold its head, put its tail right here, put your finger in its face and you can hear the rattle. But, you know, hit it with a stick! It's like that B.C. comic, "Snake." (laughs) He goes, "Wow, it didn't even seem to bother him!" "You dropped that big rock on him?" "Yeah. He just sort of crawled away. He still wouldn't rattle for me." "Boy!"
Steiger: Can you describe what's been the best part of river running for you? And what's been the worst part?
Smith: The best part of it is dealing with people, the other boatmen, having a life that you can share with people, do things and stuff -interesting people. The worst part about it, for me, is the politics within the companies themselves, and with the companies and the Park Service -which doesn't have anything to do with anything that I'm interested in. That seems to be filtering different ways, and sometimes it can come in and sometimes it goes out and stuff.
But just dealing with people. Once you get on the river, and figuring out how to fix this or how to do this, working together, you know, accomplishing something, watching people laugh, smile, and have fun yourself. That's been the great part of it. I'd definitely say that it has to be the people. The Canyon is fun, and it's great, and it's magnificent and everything, but I don't know that I would have spent three or four months a year for twenty-two years down there by myself, just looking at the Canyon. Not that it's not worthy of looking at or anything, but for me, being with the people, being with the folks, being able to share, smile. . . . But when you get back to town, scheduling, logistics, rules, insurance stuff -that's all part of it too. But it's the unattractive part of it for me.
Steiger: Well it's funny -it didn't really used to be, did it? It seemed like in the beginning it wasn't that much of a. . . . I don't know, it's weird.
Smith: There's a thing about this. . . . (brief pause for technical adjustments) Not to talk about my outfit or any particular outfitter, but they do always talk about the same boatman burnout: "Are you burned out on doing your job? Is that why you're becoming slack, or you're doing one thing or another?" Well, there's times when you want to hike, there's times when you want to do anything. And if you're there for years, you're going to go through different phases, different things. But a boatman can burn out, if they have so much work piled on them. A lot of times, when a company, if they schedule you back-to-back trips, without time out and stuff, you can burn out. And we see most boatmen have eventually moved on to different things, or supplemented their earnings from different things.
The thing that we don't talk about is owner burnout. There are owners who have companies who have fresh ideas, who want to get in there, but the way the politics are set up now, it behooves you to stay owner of a company -even if you don't want to do it -because it's so economically beneficial to keep ahold of that permit, because you can sell that permit. Now, if there was a way that the owners of the companies, when they've had enough of it, when they've had a good life, could turn it over to somebody who wanted to work it -because we can see all of the different stages that people have gone through. And if there is burnout as boatmen or as firemen, as controllers, there's gotta be burnout within the owners too. But the owners won't relinquish their hold on these companies, because they economically can't afford to. It's too beneficial. So then you see a kind of "putting everything into mashed potatoes," making things happen like this. If the owners were under a policy to where when their permit was up, it was given back to the National Park, and they could reassign it to somebody who wanted to use it. Then an owner would not have any reason to stay in the business unless he was getting something out of it, unless it charged his life, unless he was ready to go for it. If he's made a good living and everything, and if he hangs onto it for a hundred years, it ain't going to be worth any more than it is the day he gives it back. Then they could be in there and they would stay fresh and they would be open. But this system that they have set up right now, to where there are so many people that they can sell this to that and that -that distorts a lot of the free enterprise, and the growth too. I do know of people who have hung onto their company, or will make agreements with people that they can sell it or discharge it in a particular way, and they've already made these agreements, and they're doing it solely for cash. If everybody, every concessionaire in the Canyon, when they were ready to quit the business and say, "Okay, I'm getting out of it" -if they got out of it and their permit went back to the federal government, that'd be one thing. Every one of them that gets out of it right now, they get out of it with million-dollar boosts, by selling their user days to another company.
Steiger: I hadn't actually thought of that, but the problem is, right now -and here's a question for you: How do you take these guys out that have spent all this money? Like for example, here's a second generation: you've got like Bruce Winter and Bill Gloeckler, and--- you remember those guys from Relco? What do you do? They're in hock up to their ears from buying Heaton and Fred out, so how do you. . . . If you start saying something like that, how do you sell that to them, and how do you make that fair for them?
Smith: I think that that is one of the most beneficial things, where young people that are coming in and working it. If I had to make up the Park Service rules, what I would do is, I would give ten-year leases on something, up to ten years, and that way they could get better financing, instead of financing on a five-year permit. You have to put so much money into a company. Every concessionaire owns his own property, he owns his boats, and he owns his equipment. That can be sold, if somebody wants to buy it. If he's going to sell it at the right price, it can be there. But if you say "You have to buy it, this is the only way that it's to sell," this would benefit more people like Gloeckler and those young people who have. . . . And you can see this in every one of the old people who've run companies -they run them and they love it. In some of them, there's families turning it over to their children: and that's completely responsible, as long as there's new generations and stuff. But you can get to a point to where a person could give a shit about it, but they cannot afford to give it up, or without selling their user days. Now, they can always sell their property: they can sell their boats and everything. And they can hire their boatmen from wherever they want to, but when they are basing their entire livelihood on the user days that belong to the United States public, when they are through with them, if they don't want them any more, they should not be able to sell them for a million dollars. They should say, "I'm walking away from this, and I'm selling my equity in my property over here, and here, government, you reassign these days." Because those days should be for the people. It should not be for these twenty-two groups to be here forever. It was never written in the law of the land that these people have the singulatory right to jurisdiction over these days forever. If someone is burnt out and they want out of the business, they still won't get out because they can't afford to give up that money.
Steiger: Okay, but the problem is, we haven't started -and I'm asking, because I really want. . . . It's still, though, because we're not starting from Square One -what do you do with these guys, like the guys that are in now that paid, like Bruce and Bill. I don't know what it is -they're probably up a couple of a million, probably more, probably 2-3 million dollars in the hole. If we stand up there right now and say, "Hey, these guys shouldn't own these companies," how do you make it. . . .
Smith: No, we don't say that.
Steiger: ___________ can't sell them. But if the Park says to them right now they can't sell them and they're already at a million dollars, How do you take them out? what they had to pay to get in?
Smith: What they can do is, they can be given a permit. Now, their million dollars that's invested is invested in property, and in boats and stuff like that. They should always be able to sell that on the open market, somewhere, so that's not done. But the money that they make above and besides that, that comes from the Park and having this permit -I think that those guys ought to be allowed, and given more money. I think that anybody who is interested in owning a river company and willing to put it into it, I'm saying that there is burnout between owners, as there is in boatmen, and there is no checks about it. I think young people -Bruce and those guys -whatever they have, if they have enough time and they can make enough money, their property and stuff is going to be worth. . . . And if their permit was ever denied to them -I don't know why it should be, as long as they have the enthusiasm. The Park Service can look at this, but they can take people who could care less about the company, and you know. . . . If you know someone's being completely -gutting the public, not giving services, or is not a good person -the Park Service should be able to say, "Hey, we're not going to renew your contract." If you're totally into it, it can be renewed forever. The profit off of that, those guys can make, their things can be paid for. If they decide that they want to sell their company, if they've made enough money and everything and they say, "Well, now we want to forget this and we want to turn it over to somebody else. We're going to get out of it, we've had enough. We want to sell it." Now, the Park Service sells the days, and there's going to be someone who has a company and says, "Hey, we'll sell you our land, our boats, and all the stuff. We've got it all set up." They can get their money back out of that. And that way, it can be done. But if they set there and say, "Well, we'll reward you, even though you want to get out of here, but you know that you've got this permit and it's going to be forever yours," they'll set there and they'll dabble in it, and then they'll eventually fuck it up. And I think that they ought to be able to be allowed to be there, but there ought to be some kind of safeguard. And the way that it could be, is, like you have the right to graze on this land -you don't have the rights to the land. If your cows can go out there and eat the bushes, you know, like for what we say, and you can make money off this and we can, then everything's square. But when you're through using the land, the land is ours, it belongs to the federal government. You don't sell your grazing rights to another farm -they go back to the government, and it can give it to whoever it feels like. But once you get the rights on it, then what's to check? What's going to ever make an owner -no matter even if he hates the business, staying in there -get out of there? He's going to have carte blanche on this.
The federal government right now is investigating these things as a result of our selling Yosemite and so many of our national parks to foreign investors. They're reinvestigating their policies throughout the entire Canyon. The individual outfitters say, "You have to do this, because our company's got to look good, or you're not going to have a job." The boatmen are always going to have a job, because there's a need for qualified people. Who owns the company is politics. That's between the Park Service, the company owners. . . . But the company will say, "If you don't do this for our company it'll be like this or that." There's going to be boats going down there, and they're going to need qualified people to do it. If every company was to change hands right now, up in the air, still, all the boatmen would have work, because the new companies are going to need people to work for them. The only difference that it's going to make is who's signing our checks, and their attitudes.
Steiger: How do you make sure that the good ones get in there?
Smith: Now, that's a tricky thing. It can be done very easily: it can be done pretty easily. But there's ways. The way that it is now, nobody has a voice in it. You could ask every passenger what they think. You could ask every boatman. If there's 500 boatmen in the Canyon and you say, "What do you think of this person?" not all 500 people, or like if 499 said, "Hey, this guy is a jerk," then if they don't take all of the guides' information, all of the passengers' information and say, "Hey, maybe this is a clue to investigate this one person, or this consortium, or this alliance," because the word's out, everybody knows who's doing what to everybody. And it isn't hard, and you wouldn't have to be malicious, you wouldn't have to change anything, except take the incentive of the owners to use it as a business, make money, but not to say, "Hey, this is mine forever. And now I'm not in this for the river, but I'm in this for the investment for what I can sell it for in the future." Being into it for that reason alone. . . . (ffttt!) If you're into it [with the attitude], "Hey, I want to run a good river running company. This is what I want to do, this is where I want to be. I don't care about the future, I'm not selling it for that, I want to do it because it's here." That's one thing. But to say that you're in it and say, "Hey, I could give a shit about that, I'm in it for what I can sell it for," which a corporation like Del Webb, buying different companies and everything -are you going to tell me that they really care about giving trips to people?! Or are they in it to make money? Now, if they can hold this thing, and they can sell their river days to any river company, that's why they're in it. They're in it for the money -they're not in it for the fucking river, they're not in it for the people, they're not in it for any other thing than to make money. By taking that one thing away from these people, then you would find out who the owners are that want to be there and want to do it. And a lot of the others, they'll get on with their lives, and they'll do what they were going to do anyway. And then you will see these companies, the relationships between the boatmen and the passengers -like what got us onto this -it didn't seem like there used to be so much argumentation between the boatmen and the staffing and all of this. That never even existed! It never existed. Then all of a sudden they get another secretary, and they get something, and they've got to have people and everything, and then half of your life is consumed with dealing with what's going on off the river, instead of what's on the river. And the more professional that these guys get, or the more rules they get to protect themselves, it isn't going to weed out any bad ones -it's going to encourage them to stay in there, to make a buck.
Edwards: I kind of hope we don't hear any of this! (everybody laughs)
Steiger: I had never heard that idea expressed quite like that. I wish you wouldn't be so logical, Wesley! I mean, I just think about even publishing this -God, that'd piss them off!
Edwards: Oh! You're telling me!
Smith: Oh, they'll just crank it up to me being an alcoholic.
Steiger: Oh, I don't know about that.
Edwards: You've got some really good points. I feel a little differently about who's going down the river: only wealthy people go down the river now. I think the river belongs to the American people. I think the Park belongs to the American people.
Smith: Is this still on?
Edwards: Yeah.
Smith: We can turn it off for a second.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

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Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection
Wesley Smith Interview
Interview number: 53.47
[BEGIN SIDE A]
This is the River Runners Oral History Project, and we're here with Wesley Smith. Dave Edwards is running the camera, and I'm Lew Steiger. This is the Spring Guides Training Seminar, 1994, and we're at Marble Canyon.
Steiger: I guess for starters, we need to go into your background on the river and stuff, and how you got there. But before we even get down to that, what we ought to do is just hear a little bit about your background before you ever hit the river. Where were you born and raised?
Smith: I've got this down pretty good. You know we answer this question a lot with our folks on the river.
I was born in Williams, Arizona, in 1946; lived there all my life, went to high school; hiked up and down the Canyon. I swore when I was a senior in high school I'd never go down there again. I went to college, went to Vietnam, came back from Vietnam, hung out, wasn't ever going to work again in my life. My younger brother worked at a gas station in Williams where ARTA drove through and they filled up their gas trucks. He said, "Hey, my brother's a bum. Will you give him a job?" (laughs) A few weeks later, they came through, Roger Hoagland [spelling ?] had fallen off the back of a boat and broken his ankle, and they needed somebody. So they [said], "Tomorrow, be here, channel-locks, cutoffs." I knew nothing about the river, running it or anything.
I started out on this first trip with these guys and then they asked me to come back, do another trip. I'd done three trips, and on the fourth trip we were unloading the boats at Lee's Ferry, and we were pushing a little too hard at the back, Roger fell off again, rebroke his ankle, and I got to be a boatman and take the boat down. (chuckles)
Now at this time, I knew nothing about boating. I had been down three times, but the trips had to go on, _________, "Hey, you're it." So Louise and myself---now Louise and Roger had been married and Louise, I thought, knew more about the river than I knew---we both would write on our hands all the layers of the Grand Canyon. If someone said, "What layer is that?" And you'd go, "Let me see (consulting hand), it's Tapeats." (laughs) And if you did the dishes too much, you know, then you couldn't really have an orientation or anything. We didn't know how to start the motors, how to fix them. If it wasn't for the people on our trip, being able to repair motors, and for the grace of God, you know, because we actually weren't professionals in those days. We didn't know much about. . . .
Steiger: I thought it was snout boats that you started out with. So these were motor trips?
Smith: Oh yeah, these were motor trips. We just put all the tubes together and a platform up there, chains around it, threw all the gear in the middle, threw a tarp over it, and ropes back and forth, and that was it.
Steiger: So it was a boat similar to the picture of the boat . . .
Smith: Turning over? Yeah. Exactly the same. I had some skills when I first came back from Vietnam of rescue and first aid -sort of like in situations where you don't know what's going on. (chuckles)
Steiger: If it's okay to talk about: when you were over in Vietnam, what was going on? What branch of the Service were you in? What was your job?
Smith: I was in the infantry. I was a private when I got there. I got there about two weeks before the Tet Offensive in 1968. I worked on the Mekong Delta. The company that I went into had 130 men. I left it in eight months and we had gone through 520 men to maintain 130-men strength. There was like 12 people, 6, 2, somebody killed every day. Sometimes hundreds of people stacked up. So I was just really lucky, the way booby traps would misfire, one thing or another. I was there for a few months and then I was in charge of the group that was there. But, you know, the turnover was so fast and everything, that's not very uncommon at all.
So anyway, I got out of there [Vietnam], and I got back to school. I got an early out to go back to college, so I was in a firefight and then I was in a classroom about fifteen days later. And my teachers told me that I couldn't concentrate! (ironic laugh) So I skipped out of education for a while and was just hanging out. And then this great opportunity came. They said, "Hey, come on the river." I have met so many good people down there. The boatmen, working with them, is similar to having the camaraderie like you would have in Vietnam or something like that, where everyone depends on each other, they know what each other is doing, they're working for a common good, "let's keep each other alive, let's help each other out here," and stuff. A lot of the places in the world, you can't find that experience, or you can't work with people -you have to rely on how they are and stuff. But I've found that on the river.
And then on top of that, there's a million people that go down there, and they're all experts in one field or another. You can pick anybody's brain about science, how they [float?] hydrogen, nuclear reactors, medicine, carpentry -anything. And just float down with these people, pick their heads, they pick your head. Wow! You learn everything!
Steiger: How did you get to Vietnam in the first place? Did you get drafted, or what was the deal on that?
Smith: Yeah. I went to school. My skills weren't very good. In fact, they did a study at NAU -I started like in 1964 -and they did a spelling thing of every student in the school. And the dean calls me in and said, "Well, Wesley, someone had to be the worst." (laughs) So I really wasn't into school at that time. It was like something just to do. So I went for about two years, and then they told me that I had to take a year off -got kicked out of school, sort of like, for a year. And about two minutes after you're kicked out of school they send a thing right to the draft board. And like a week later. . . . This inspired a lot of people to stay in school, because the minute you dropped out of school, you're immediately kicked into the draft. And there I was.
Steiger: It wasn't one of these things where you signed up for it, you thought it was a good thing, "God bless America?”
Smith: No, they told me I had to go, because I couldn't make the grades in school. And I could make the grades, I just wasn't interested in it at the time. And it was like, "If you don't do good, you're going to go to Vietnam." The minute I was out of school, just like that (snaps fingers). Everybody in that same era had the same thing occur. The next thing you know, you're in the Army. And then. . . . You know.
Steiger: Well what did you think about all that stuff then, about having to go over there and all that?
Smith: Oh, I was completely ignorant about the whole thing. I got taken into Fort Bliss, and then I got sent to Colorado to basic training. And great, we could ski in the winter and everything. This buddy of mine, Jim Gannon, from Iowa, he said, "Hey, we're going to miss the whole thing! We've got a friend down here that graduated with us. He can send us anywhere we want to go." I said, "Well, where do we want to go?" He said, "Vietnam." "I've been hearing something about that. Do you know anything about it?" "No, let's go there." "Well, you know what, we can get a three-day pass, and we can take off for Thanksgiving. We can be home at Christmas, we can get our thirty days for going overseas. We can have forty-five days off here! And then we'll go to this Vietnam." We went over there like, (humming), "What's going on here?" And we met everyone and we talked and everyone's going, "Yeah, it's pretty casual, not much going on here." Four days later the Tet Offensive started. The North Vietnamese took over every town in South Vietnam. They're dropping 500-pound bombs on hotels in the middle of Saigon. It was a different war from that moment on. And we were so dumb about it, the first day out in the field you say, "Ut-oh, I don't like this. I'm going to go back and I'm going to freak out. I'm going to tell them 'I'm out of here, I'm leaving this place.'" I mean, you call in artillery and stuff, you go in a ditch, you look at someone, you try to pull their arm out, and you get the whole trunk of their body. Their legs are missing, their head's missing. They're telling you, "Dig in the mud," finding stuff, pulling it out, and I'm going, "Whoa! What's going on?!" And kicked ass like that (snaps fingers) every day from then on out. And it's "Whoa! What is happening here?!"
You have two choices: If you freak out, they send you to Long Bin Jail [spelling ?], which is a military prison in Vietnam, where they brutalize and will horrorize American citizens . . . under taxpayer dollars, under the auspice of the federal government. And these kids come back from that place, back to the line. They freak out and say, "Well, send me to jail. I'm not going to fight any more, I'm not going to go out there, I'm not going to kill. I'm not going to do this." And they go "Ha! You're not home, you're in this country and we have a military prison," and they put them in there, shoot them with fire hoses and brutalize them.
Steiger: Americans are doing this?!
Smith: Americans to Americans! These kids come back. . . . And I wanted to take that route, but I saw so many cases of it, and they come back and they're like zombies. Because you go into that prison, the minute you object, your time stops, and however long it takes to break you, you're in there, and then you're coming back. If you were killed in that prison, your body, your paperwork, is shipped to a line unit and you're cranked up there, and they have to pay no attention to anybody.
But anyway, I've seen these kids come back, and they go, "I can't do this, I'm not going to do it," and just stand up like this, (makes shooting sound), to get shot, just to get out of there. You can't kill yourself in an American prison, but they can beat you so much that you will come back like that. So there's no obstinance. There's no way that -once you're over there. If it was in South America or something like that, you could walk home. But you can't swim across. There's nothing that you can do except go out there and say, "Well, I'm going to do what I can do. I'm going to protect my brothers, and I'm going to try to kill as few people as I can, because it's for no reason." You know? We're on their land, we're stomping on it, trying out our weapons and stuff. (ironic chuckle) We left anyway. Has it changed the world? It would have been the same if we had never gone over there, except we wouldn't be missing so many Americans. And we talk about our people that are Missing In Action?! (ironic chuckle) They have hundreds of thousands. You can just see these bombers coming by just blowing these whole towns up. You can't find a piece of anybody for whole square miles! And we think that we need to know accountability?! We do -but they would like some accountability too. And it's splattered all over the whole country. You know, we did some wrong things there. We are dealing with Agent Orange back here, the guys who get sprayed a little bit, working in it. How would you like to be sprayed with it at the same time, year after year, have it on all your trees, in your water system, in your water tables, in all of your food?! You think that they're not going through the shit that we're going through?! It's incredible how irresponsible. . . .
It's sickening that Americans treat Americans like that. And it's sickening that we have no recourse. In the sixties, a lot of people voiced out to stop wars and stuff. But these poor guys over there in the Desert Storm -they're all coming back sick. The government is denying that they have any diseases. Their children are goofed up. The entire thing. . . . And they go, "Hm."
Now this nuclear weapon thing has come up. When I was a kid in Williams, we would go out to the airport and we would set there and we would watch the sky light up as they did the explosions here in Nevada. And we would drive back to Williams, and we would feel the entire town shake. My father owned a drugstore. We also have a big basement in it, so we had civil defense supplies and stuff in it. He would take a Geiger counter, and after it rained, he would go around the aisles, and he could tell where people had come in with radiation.
Steiger: That was in Williams?!
Smith: In Williams, yeah.
Steiger: And that was like in the late fifties?
Smith: Yeah. It was neat! It was an event! Everybody in town would drive out to the airport and set there, a big line of cars. Big explosion in the sky. Come back to Williams and set there and wait: (makes sound of explosion and demonstrates shaking) the shock wave. You could just feel it running across the thing. But the radiation: my dad had a Geiger counter, and he would go daily across the floors and see how much was brought into the store and stuff.
Steiger: So you remember seeing all that shit.
Smith: Yeah.
Steiger: Man oh man!
Smith: I don't know if we got off the subject. (laughs)
Steiger: No, I don't think we did -I really don't. I mean, I had never heard something like that. I don't think we got off track. I had no idea. I don't guess you could. I don't guess there'd be any way.
Smith: In Vietnam, sort of a thing, anyone who's there before you, you respect and you think that they know more than you do, that they know one trick or another. And after I was there for about two-and-a-half months, I was the oldest person there. And all the younger people would look and say, "What do we do?" It's sort of like being a head boatman. I cross-use these skills. It's like, "What do we do?" All you gotta do is. . . . “I don't know what the fuck you do!" and freak out and watch everyone just go in every fuckin' different direction. And you can say, "Ha!" and just use whatever sense you have, you know. Everybody's just right behind you, doing exactly what you say.
Steiger: As long as you were in control.
Smith: Right. And now the thing about it is, I knew that I didn't know anything about it. But, as little as I know about it, I knew ten minutes more of it than they did. And when we started rafting and stuff too, it's the same way: nobody knew about anything. But all you could do was try. You know, we were forced into a lot of situations. We didn't say "we're professionals." You know? "Hey, these trips are going. You want to try this?" And the people more or less knew that they were on an adventure too. They didn't really. . . . Not like nowadays.
Steiger: They didn't expect anything.
Smith: Yeah. It's pretty much canned, you can expect certain things one way or another.
We had a trip that I worked for Jumping Mouse last year. And it started out in a terrible rainstorm up here. We had like four paraplegics, putting them on boats. We have a lot of autistic people, cerebral palsy. They all weathered this, and we just got dumped on and dumped on and dumped on. Then we did a really long day down to MatKat [phonetic spelling], below in there. And in the morning, the head boatman said to the people, "You know, this is really great. You guys didn't complain or anything about this. On a commercial trip right now, if we had done the same thing, everyone would say, 'It's too light, it's too dark.'" The complaints that can come up from nowhere! Like you can really affect anything! And these people, they're all disabled and everything, saw that we were doing the best that we could, that we couldn't affect anything, and they kept a good attitude, and it just worked for everybody. And the head boatman of the trip thanked the people in the morning and said, "If this was a commercial trip, this would be a whole different place here right now."
Steiger: Was that the way it was. . . . Like, how did that very first trip that you did, strike you?
Smith: Oh! It was just like going into the Bible or something! (exclamation of awe) I was looking around, and I thought it was the only time I was ever going to be able to see anything. I looked at it and I went, "Wow, this is just so neat!" I was just so happy to do it. And I never thought that I would be asked back to do it [again] or anything. But somebody wasn't healed, and they said, "Hey, come on. You work good." And, oh, boy, I tell you, it was just incredible. And I'm sure it's like that for everybody. There's places in the Canyon that I haven't gone, that I don't go, that I save for special events.
Steiger: How long had you been back from Vietnam before you got on the river?
Smith: About a year-and-a-half.
Steiger: So you were still in pretty good shape and all that.
Smith: Yeah.
Steiger: And what were the passengers like on that first trip?
Smith: Oh, they were so supportive. Me and Louise were there, and we were both looking at each other, and I'm going, "Louise knows everything," and she's going, "Wesley knows everything." And between the two of us (laughs), we'd bounce it back and forth. But I tell you, the motors, we used to have those shear pins in. And the amount of driftwood in the river was just all the time! Just about the time you're going into Crystal or something (makes sound of buzz saw, then a crash). You're pulling up the motor, trying to pull out the cotter key. We'd drop more props and channel locks in the river than you could shake a stick at. And trying to get it back on, getting it up there, and then trying to crank the sucker before you get into the hole! The guy that trained me, Hugh Wingfield and Dave Hosenbrock [phonetic spellings] and his wife: you would just go. . . . When the motor would go out, we'd just go ahead and get up on top of that load and set there with everybody else. (laughs) And Georgie would say, "Here we go!" (exclamation of panic) Like, "Well, here's my pliers, I'm not going to be down there fiddling with that." You know, like, you get it changed, you're going to be out of there before it's anything.
But I was paranoid. I tell you, I've taken people down, and I can teach them how to read the river or something, and I can see them go to sleep some. I didn't go to sleep for probably the first nine years. I'd hear one little thing, I'm going, "Ut-oh, ut-oh." And some people say, "Well, you feel very comfortable with us now?" I said, "Yes," because I think I've been stuck in here every possible way you can, and I know how to get off of it. "Okay, this is where we're going to end up, and this is how we get off."
Steiger: This is Crystal you're talking about? Or any of them?
Smith: Every one. Every rock that you can possibly get screwed up on. I've been there, or I've seen somebody there, I think.
Steiger: Did we get it down what year it was that you first went?
Smith: In 1970.
Steiger: I'm trying to remember how it was different then, just physically, the place.
Smith: Oh, we used to come into camp, your stove thing would just be like. . . . You'd go and dig like this and make a pit. Get four stones, put the two rails across, throw a thing down, all the chicky pails [dishwater] all the food. Camping on. . . . And just in the morning, just leaving the firepit, just pulling your things out and leaving it. All the beaches were just cluttered with all these different little campfire things.
Steiger: Had to get your wood before you camped.
Smith: (laughs) Oh, the river was so full of wood that it was (sarcasm) like a problem! And you get to the back of Lake Mead, and you try to get to Pierce's Ferry, all the way across the river, like for a quarter of a mile, just logs, logs, logs. You have people out on the front of the boat with big sticks, going like this. No slip clutches, just. . . . (ching, ching) Along with having an Allen wrench today, and duct tape, a box of shear pins. Nah! They were gold to trade. When Mercury [marine motor company] came out with that thing, what a blessing, boy! [the invention of the slip-clutch] The bosses liked it too -it started saving them money. (laughs) I'd run those things up.
Steiger: Was there a clear-cut shift between motoring and rowing?
Smith: More or less, the major change came. . . . I'd worked for about three years. The Park Service started this rumor that they were going to change the jurisdiction in the Canyon and that the companies should convert to rowing, because they were going to try to outlaw motor things. All the companies that were working, worked on the motor boats. So some of the companies believed that rumor and some of them didn't. It's come to pass to prove that motorboats are going to be down in the Canyon. They've had this discussion, they've done all these impact studies and everything. But when they first started the rumor and invited the companies to convert into rowing, AZRA started developing a rowing program down in the Grand Canyon where there was mostly bigger boats or dories. At that time they brought a lot of the California crew out: Don Briggs, Melville, all those guys that knew how to row boats and stuff, they brought them out here. At that time we were rowing basket boats, light boats from off of life boats -round circles and stuff.
Steiger: They had those "roll bars." (laughs)
Smith: Yeah. First step, we'd cut them off of them. Jerry Jordan cut the bottom off of one (laughs) in Havasu one day. Collapsed the whole thing. And then the Wynn [spelling ?] brothers, who were great stallions in the AZRA company, they came on-line. And then Peter Wynn started developing this snout design, and we went through about three generations of frames with those. When we started rowing them, nobody knew how to row them, nobody knew a catamaran system or anything. You can teach somebody like this something right now, in a day. But when you're trying to figure it out, you know, like we'd come back to work that year and someone'd go, "I know how we get in that eddy! Let's aim our tubes toward the eddy, and then we'll just power into it!" Instead of, like, getting broadside and just letting the current go and trying to make it across. We tried everything. We used to work twice as hard. Every year, you'd come back to work, it gets easier and easier. "Ah, ah, ah." Now, proper boating and how to use techniques and everything, it's so commonplace, because everybody shares this information.
This is the only other thing that I wanted to make a statement about: In Vietnam, we shared every secret that we knew with every other person, because we knew that eventually it could save our lives. In the river community, in a lot of jobs where you have an apprenticeship, like making shoes, making gold, making whatever -pharmacy -a lot of those things can go slow. In the river business, everybody has to share their knowledge with everybody, and that way we can all stay safe. If you're an old boatman and you know some secrets, and you see a young person come along, and if you keep that information from him, sure as shit, your ass is going to be in a sling one day: You'll be going down (makes sound of getting in trouble), "I wonder if I told him about. . . ." [Meaning, "I wonder if I told him about this little piece of information that's going to save my butt right now."]
This is a place some people have tried to interpret river running and stuff as like being snobbish and the old people have this and that. But I think the information of keeping each other safe, and being able to provide every bit of knowledge to every person. . . . That way we can really take care of the people and we can take care of each other. And I really hate it when -and I've worked with companies overseas in different places to where boatmen have been, (in a snobbish tone) "Excuse me." They're very cliquish. They will watch and they will know something that's going to happen at a rapid, and they won't advise me of that beforehand. And they will be telling the people on their boat, "Watch this! (laughs)" And set you up to make mistakes, and to not share knowledge, and to be so concerned that if they don't keep this knowledge, they won't keep their job. None of us are going to keep our jobs -we're all filtering through, you know.
Steiger: Well, you didn't encounter that stuff here in the Canyon, did you?
Smith: Ahhhh, I have. This is human nature. It's something that we all just have to say, "Hey, this is what we're going to do, or we're going to work away from." Because it's youth, it's misunderstanding, it's egoism. It's just those things. And those things are going to exist forever. Just knowing that you can say, "Hey, if I know a secret, I'd better tell this person that secret, because this is. . . ." You know, like how to work a carabiner, how to do anything. If everyone's cross-educated with anything pertaining to safety. . . . But I have worked on rivers with people, and on this river. And I've seen people, if the head boatman has an attitude. . . . Anybody can make of a trip what they want to. But it doesn't get you anywhere to do that.
Steiger: To make it bad, yeah.
Smith: In other places where I've worked ___________. Because I take somebody, and I know a new person is going down the river, I'll say, "Watch out for this one." Like at the bottom of Nankoweap, like that rock that's there. Like, row one way or another. Or someplace, you know, like where you get hung up. Say, "Hey, you might want to go right or left or something like that." Just the basic courtesies, you know. And then sometimes you go somewhere and everyone's just rowing off from you, and you _______. It's good to know the river yourself, but it's [better] if every boatman supports each other and shares all that information.
Steiger: Have you run a bunch of other rivers all over the place?
Smith: I worked in Africa with Dave Edwards and Kevin, for a few [months?] on the Zambezi.
Steiger: ___________________.
Smith: Yeah. I just did the lower part between the falls and Sangue [phonetic spelling]. Then we went up to Tanzania and did the Rafigi [phonetic spelling] through the Zulu Game Reserve. I've done most of the ones here in Arizona, San Juan and those guys. We went to Thailand and we did some in bamboo boats -crazy bamboo boats. Walked through all of the poppy fields up to this place, ride on elephants for a day, and then they take you to a place where they have a mill downstream for the bamboo, and they have no way to get it there. But the dumb tourists come through, so they take all of these great big, like, eighteen-, twenty-two-foot pieces of bamboo, and thrash them together about nine foot wide, and they build a little tripod out on there, and we all get on board, and tie your packs onto it. They give you a pole, and you start taking off down this river. Kevin Johnson's got, this limb comes like that, just knocks him off the boat. It's incredible: some places you come to corners where there's hundreds of these boats that are all just smashed or making a sieve around this corner. You might lose everything, but they don't tell you this. [You're lucky] to get away with your life. And then finally you get down to this place and you see a saw mill there, and you've just brought in the new load of logs! (laughter) Just carve them up there, and say, "Here, Josh, here's your bus again." (laughter) We didn't even have to do it ourselves -we got paid to let these guys do it! And it's totally out of control. Nobody knows what's going on. There may be one guy, and he's yelling, running from boat to boat.
Steiger: Well, I guess the Canyon, we were a little more under control then, when all that started.
Smith: We did have some good advisors. Everybody really supported each other. We went through a lot of phases to where, like now we have the radio communication. Our evacuation stuff and everything is so top-of-the-line compared to what it used to be.
Steiger: For you, what's the job of being a guide in the Grand Canyon, all about?, if you had to put your finger on it. And have you seen that change since the time that you started?
Smith: Yeah, I've seen it change. It's just like growing up. Have you noticed that you've grown up in the last ten years?
Steiger: Yeah.
Smith: Different sides look different? It happens so casually that you don't notice it anyway. It's just what you do.
Steiger: Like what did you see? What would have been the job description in the seventies? If somebody had just said, "Okay, what's your job here? What's the point of it?"
Smith: They just say, "Okay now, take care of those folks, and we'll see you at the other end." Whatever it entails! (laughs) You have to know how to start an engine, to cook food, to do first aid, to lead hikes, to interpret natural history and geology -all of those things come very slowly, especially for me. A lot of people take off with degrees and stuff and have studied stuff, but almost everything that I know has been taught to me by the passengers. One of them will be reading a book. . . . And I bring a lot of books. After lunch, I pass them out and someone reads, "Oh look, it says right here. . . " that we're going past this or that. And I'll [think], "Hm, I'll remember that."
Steiger: You mean almost everything you know about the river has been taught to you by the passengers? The interpretive stuff?
Smith: Oh, all the geology, all the faults, all of the plants. I knew it all, but like names and how, sequence and everything. And I just listen to them read and discuss back and forth. I have no formal training on any of this. And if there's anything I can't think of, I go, "How does that go together? I understand that and that, but this here. . . ." And then all of a sudden a geologist will come on your boat, and you go, "Well, now, explain that to me." He explains that to you, and then all of a sudden, you know everything. Except when you go on a trip with Larry.
Steiger: Stevens?
Smith: Oh yeah. (laughter) He does everything ______________. I just got the five things down okay, I don't need to know. . . . Because he can tell you not only what bug it is, but what kind of fleas are on its shoulder and what kind of parasites are on it.
Steiger: So, like, when you started out, that's what you did -you wrote the names of the rocks on your hand?
Smith: Yeah. Knew nothing! Never heard of river running, never knew of it. My brother said to me, "I can get you a job on the river." I said, "Well, what are we doing?" I thought it was like coal barges or something like that. He said, "No, you take people down on boats on vacation." I said, "Uh-huh. Where were they?" And when I remember the Grand Canyon -we used to hike down before the dam -underneath the bridge there at Phantom Ranch, where the nice little lagoon and stuff is, there used to be these big sand dunes, and it used to be that real silty mud. And in Boy Scouts we used to go down there. And they had apple orchards all up there, apricots. We would get in the trees.
Steiger: At Phantom Ranch?
Smith: Yeah. But we'd go out on those mud dunes, and we'd wiggle in the mud, and just like that, you would start sinking. And the last time I played on one of those things, I got in it, and I got about to here, and everyone started laughing. And then I got down to here, and I got up to here. And there was like about nine kids trying to pull me back out. And it took like about two hours, just pulling the mud and everything out. And I finally got back out on the beach, and I'm going, "Yeah! You'd better take off running!" Uh! it was the worst experience of my life -almost -getting stuck in that mud.
And we all used to go down a little bit further, but once you get down so far, you know, you just. . . . The agitation and everything, you just start going down, and then everyone realized how serious it was. I was spitting out mud at times. How they got me back out is amazing.
Steiger: So that's like late fifties or something?
Smith: Yeah, anywhere in the sixties. I graduated in 1964. But we went down there: every Boy Scout group, every church group, every graduating group. I mean, you walked up and down that Canyon so damned much that you just [got] tired of it. It wasn't like "fun," like going out to the woods. It's like, "You guys are going to go somewhere this weekend." "Oh, far out. Let's go to Phoenix. I hear they have a TV down there. They have swimming pools." They would entice us to walk to the bottom of the Grand Canyon to swim in the swimming pool that they had there. And we'd swim in the swimming pool, but we wouldn't get in the creek. We wouldn't get in the river. I mean, that was. . . . But the swimming pool! "Yeah, let's go!"
Steiger: So you weren't totally sold on the Boy Scouts then?
Smith: No. This is just some things our scoutmaster did: "You guys don't want to take any canned foods." So we'd open up the cans and we'd dump everything into plastic bags and put them in your pack, you know. And then you get down there and then it's all a big mush, and he was calling you dummies, you know. You go, "How about a little bit of leadership here?" (chuckles) We get up to the rim, and it's like before the light even comes up, and we're all ready to go. "I wanna sleep!" "A-ha! It's noon. Let's go!" But you know, it wasn't. . . . It was just. . . . We didn't know what we were doing. You know, nobody did, and nobody wants professional hikers. Nowadays, it's so easy to take a group of people, knowing what we know and everything -like to prepare them, to get them hydrated, tell them how to pack and everything. We can move a group of people back and forth so effortlessly, and be fully protected with everything.
I even got to -AZRA spotted me money to raise homing pigeons. This was before we had radios. They gave me $150 allowance and I bought six pairs of pigeons at Phoenix and I had a cage here. And I raised them for like five years. Now, the first wave of pigeons that I had, the ones that I paid twenty-five bucks for, we would take them, after I had gone for three years, and they would retrieve from the Grand Canyon back to Williams. They could make it back within an hour. But these pigeons were sort of retards. They would sit on the boats. We would have them in apple crates and stuff. And when we let them go, we'd have to throw rocks at them to make them go home!
Steiger: What was the idea? When would you send them? Would you take them down there and just report in "everything's okay"?
Smith: No, like if we had an accident, if we needed a helicopter or we needed. . . .
Steiger: You'd take this pigeon with you?
Smith: Three, on each trip.
Steiger: And how would you care for them? This was on motor trips, or rowing trips?
Smith: Oh, on rowing trips too, yeah. And they loved just sitting right there and getting splashed and stuff. But then there was a settlement down in Phoenix where this guy who died has this pigeon club: he had these babies he was selling for $150 a piece, and he gave me twenty-two of them. So then I went another three years, and we had these pigeons, they could get back to Williams within fifteen minutes from anywhere in the Grand Canyon. I took them to Cortez in a windstorm that was going that way, and they made it back to Williams within six hours, the first ones did. Very dedicated, the minute you let them go, just straight up and straight home. But then radios and stuff came in. I wasn't protecting the pigeons well. One of them, ring-tailed cats got into their cage, killed one, ________and stuff.
Steiger: But you carried them down there in a cage on the boat?
Smith: Yeah, we did for a few years there.
Steiger: ______________________.
Smith: This is amazing: once we started carrying them, we didn't have any accidents! I think the most important message we ever sent out was, "Hike a guitar into Phantom Ranch." Becca was on the trip. But we never got to make any saves with them, but we did it. When I first started taking them, for a long time they didn't do anything. And then Tom Workman got appointed up here, and he classified them as pets and then I had to go before a tribunal of the National Park and explain to them what we were doing. They didn't want anything released down there that would stay down there. But we let them go three at a time, usually one white one, you know, like, one for the peregrines, one to get lost, and the other one to get home. The first group that I had, these guys, they loved the river, man. They're homing pigeons, but they don't mind living on your gypsy wagon, you know. We throw them up in the air, they'd start flying off, and then they'd follow us for a while. And then they would land on a motorboat and someone would just walk over to them. They had these little cylinders on their leg, you take the note out, sign your name, tell them what it was, throw them back in the air. Finally they get bored and they go home. But the last ones worked.
Steiger: Sounds like it was a pretty colorful outfit back in those days. Edwards, what questions should we be asking here? (pause)
Smith: . . . and I didn't have it connected! (laughter) He was so mad! He said, "You get any pictures? Tell everybody I did that."
Edwards: Tell us about the first time you ever got bit by a snake.
Smith: Oh, snake stories! I was at this camp one time -it's right above Hance Rapid. I'm not sure the mileage. But anyway, we're having a party in this camp, and we had set the john way up around the corner. This young guy comes into the camp and says, "Wesley, I want to talk to you." I thought, "Oh my God, what have I done now?" So I go off to the side of the camp with him, and he goes, "I don't want to ruin the party or anything, but I've just been bitten by a snake." "Sit down!" (laughter) We had a few doctors on the trip and everything and they advised us more or less what's going on. This guy got bit probably around 8:00 at night, and we sent somebody with a radio up this way, and we sent a boat going downriver, and we dropped somebody off at Hance with a mirror. By 8:00 in the morning the thing had been reported like four times, so they stopped at every place coming up the river to finally rendezvous with us. I set up with this guy at night. I asked him, "What does it feel like?" "Well, it's just a little numbness in my finger here." His finger just started getting fatter and fatter. All of a sudden, his whole hand got fatter. So every hour we would draw a line around it and we would measure and mark the progression.
Steiger: That's you just taking vitals?
Smith: Yeah, I took vitals all night long. At first when it happened, all the doctors and everybody came over and they said, "Hey, we can give him pain relief." The first thing I had the guy do was drink a lot of water. I've had people who've gone into anaphylactic shock over scorpions or anything. But right after they get bit, have them get as much water on board as they can hold, because what you're going to experience is, as their twitches and that stuff go on, they aren't going to be able to drink water, they're not going to be able to hold it down, they're going to drool. And more or less what you get on board right at the beginning is all that you're going to be able to get in. You can encourage them, but they can't take oral medicines or anything. "Start slamming some water." And I set up with this guy. The doctors and everyone set up, and I go, "Well, you know, more or less what's been done is going to be done." Since he had hiked down from the mountain, it had been a few minutes and everything, we chose not to cut right at the site. It's very dangerous, and it only is just to be the skin on the top so that the poisons can come out. And I'll tell you later about this. But we laid him down, put his arm just about chest level, and then just tried to make him comfortable. We gave him Benadryl. You can have any kind of pain relievers, because it's going to be a throbbing pain -except like Percodan has aspirin in it. When a rattlesnake bites you, what it's doing is, breaking down the red blood cells. And aspirin makes you bleed and everything too, so you don't want to do that. But Percocets, anything with Tylenol, and demerol, tylox, anything like that you can use -but nothing that has aspirin in it, because that's going to accentuate the problem.
Steiger: How did you learn all this stuff? Did you have medical training?
Smith: Yeah, I went through like a medical training in Vietnam, got to practice a lot. And then I've done first aid, because I've always worked at ski areas in the winter. And then I went through the EMT program about three times, and then I went through the I-EMT program in the Flagstaff medical center, and drove an ambulance outside of Williams, between Kingman, Grand Canyon, and Flagstaff for about six years -and just picking everybody's brain about it, because I have to deal with this stuff, and there's questions I need to know. So I ask every doctor, "Hey, do you know anything about this that I don't know?" and get everybody's opinion.
Anyway, this guy goes, "Oh! Oh!" He's just screaming. They said, "You can give him two #3 Tylenols every four hours." And he said, "It feels sort of like one of those things that presses the roads, the big ones, is running over my arm, but it's going very slow and it just keeps moving up and up and up."
Now this guy was at the toilet, by himself, with the toilet paper down here at night. He reached down for the toilet paper and his fingers dangling, the snake was there looking for a mouse or something. So it did a silent bite.
Steiger: Didn't rattle?
Smith: When it doesn't rattle, and if it's striking like at little fingers or something like that, you know that you've got a good injection of the stuff, and this guy did. We got him out of there in the morning, and it was just going right here for his shoulder. I said, "Well, it might work out and you can come back in." He got to the Flagstaff hospital and his entire body bloated up like this. He was like the Michelin man, in bed for about seven or eight days. So I'd seen it work, and I'd seen the progression of it, and I could see about -I knew what kind of dose he had. We went back up and found the rattlesnake and suffocated it and sent it along with him, because they were doing some research studies at Tucson, __________ [on venom?] and stuff. So anyway, I'd seen this work, and I knew about how fast it was going and everything.
Now, I've been handling rattlesnakes for a long time. I've picked hundreds of them up. We camped at that camp right across from Deer Creek, and this one comes right out -it's a very small camp, anyway -we're getting rained on, everyone has their tents up -and this guy comes out from underneath this rock. (startled cry) And all the people are running around and everything. And I go, "Well, I'll help him out. I'll capture and take him out of here, because he's going to come out sometime during the night. No one can walk around here, he's weirded-out and everything." So I did like I usually do, I picked him up, and I have him. I've picked up snakes and I've choked them too hard and I set them down and they're a little dizzy. So I promised myself that I wouldn't hurt this snake. So I got his tail in this hand and I've got his head like this, and I've got the flashlight in my mouth, and I'm walking him up the hill to the back. And I go, "Gosh, I don't want to squeeze on that guy, I'll give him a little bit of a break." So I put my finger down like this, and over the top you can see, and he unledges his head and comes and strikes me right there. And I can see him going for this, and I go "Ooo-ooo" pulling on his tail, you know. And I looked, and I got one little tiny bead of blood right there, and I go, "You son-of-a-bitch! Do you know what kind of problems this is going to cause me?! You'd better tell all your friends they'd better not bite me any more." I take him over to the side of this sandy bank and throw him down. So it's just right there and I have this razor-sharp knife. I cut it just a little bit and sucked. Now, you see, if I'd have got any venom or anything, I would have tasted a little metallic taste or something in my mouth. I didn't get any of that. It just was one, and he just barely even started to get it in there before I had him straight again. So then I go, "Okay, now this is how this is going to be. . . . Shit, going back and telling your boatman friends and everybody you've been bit by a snake. Everyone's going to freak out." So I went back and I packed my bag to go out, straightened out my ammo box, did all these things -because I knew I'd done everything for it that could be done -and got all my shit squared away, and then I went up to my buddies and I said, "Hey, you guys, I've got to tell you a secret. Now, you're going to have to promise me one thing, if I tell you this secret, you let me be the landlord over it. Okay?" "Yeah." "Okay." "Now, tell us! tell us!" "Now, this is really big-time!" "Okay! What?" "I've just been bitten by a snake." (screams) (laughter) Everybody's all ___________________. "Wait a minute, you guys, it's not that big a deal. I mean, it just hurts. I know what to do. Just don't freak out, I've got everything squared away." "We promise we won't tell anybody." Two minutes later, every doctor is over there! (laughs) You get all this attention right off the bat, because people think when it bites you it's like an alligator or something like that. You don't even feel anything. And you're not, for a while. You've got some time to make some moves, get your attitude together, pump some water, find some shade, lay down, (chuckles) write your will in your diary. You've got some time to do that stuff. But people don't know that if they haven't been bitten or haven't seen somebody bitten. But anyway, everyone sets up with you for a while, but then the night goes on, and the thing that I saw was, my arm was swelling up, but it was going so much slower than this other person's. And I go, "Alright! I know how much I've got, and it's going to be okay." It only got up about this big. And during the night, the thing that gave me more pain was shaking it like this. I'd go down to the riverside and people would set up ____________. But eventually everyone goes to sleep. Just go down by the river and (groans and moans), and you start moaning and shaking and all the pain goes away. And then all of a sudden someone will wake up to take a pee and they hear you or see you and run up to you, "Are you okay?" And you stop for a second, "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." Then it starts hurting again.
Steiger: Why were you shaking it? Just to shake it down?
Smith: I don't know, it just gave me comfort, just to move it like that, and to moan out loud. I could set there like this and just. . . . It'd just be throbbing. (moans) It would just be fine, but it sounded terrible. I'll bet it scared people to look at it. But in the morning, it was more or less gone. "I don't need to go out." But these doctors -we had another trip that was coming down, they had like thirty-five doctors on it, and they were doing emergency medicine and everything. And they came over and said, "Hey, you're stupid if you don't go out." That tiny little divot right there is the only necrosis that I have. But they said, "Since it's in your finger, it could go. . . ." The antivenin, before, they said you have to have it within twelve hours. And they go, "No, you can have it in thirty-six hours. Go on out! Go for the treatment and everything." So then that afternoon they called a helicopter, I got a ride out, got to the clinic and the doctor said, "We can't give you antivenin." I said, "Hey, thirty-five doctors on the river just told me I could." He called up Tucson [Poison Control Center] and they said, "Yeah, give it to him." So they gave it to me, and then they sent me to a bone surgeon in Flagstaff, Luicki [phonetic spelling], to make sure that the vein [snake's fang] didn't go through the bone, and put anything in the marrow. The thing ended up costing about $35,000 to Industrial Comp and to AZRA and everybody. So they told me I wasn't allowed to pick up any more snakes.
Steiger: How could it cost that much?
Smith: Oh, helicopter ride out -which is not that much -and the surgeon, and I don't know. I know I got spanked severely for it. They told me, "You can move snakes and stuff, but you gotta use a stick or a bucket or something. You can't personally put your hands on them any more." That's okay! (laughs) I don't want to!
Steiger: Do you have a favorite river story?
Smith: Gosh, not really. There's one that brings to mind: When Chris Brown -we were taking paddle boats, we'd take like a little Redshank or something like that. . . .
Steiger: That was Chris Brown?
Smith: Christopher Brown, yes. He was running with us. And we almost all made the turn to the right-hand side in Crystal, and he wrapped a snout boat on it. They were trapped out there on the rocks.
Steiger: _________________________
Smith: Right on the very tip of the island. (Technical snafu with video tape, Wes is asked to start his story again.) The question proposed to me was, Did I have any outstanding events or anything happen, so I'm going to tell you about this one that happened in Crystal Rapid with myself, Chris Brown, and I'm not sure who the other boatmen were. But all the snout boats make it to the right hand side, except for Chris. He lands it right up on the island. We were carrying at that time -paddleboating wasn't done in the Grand Canyon, especially not at those big water levels or anything -and we had this little Redshank that we had pulled up and we would take it out on calm sections and stuff, but we never did any major rapids or anything with it. They're stuck out there, the water's coming up, and the boat's getting sunk underwater. We can't do anything for them. So I drafted about six of the youngest kids on the trip. From the bottom boat we found a big log, we tied it on there like a dead animal on sticks, and we walked all the way up to the top of the rapid. There were some private trips coming through, and we asked them -they had Avons and they had boats that they could do it, but nobody had the skill. They said, "No, we can't get out there and get in that backwash and rescue those people. It'd be insane to do that." And with our skills nowadays, any one of us would go out there and we could do this routinely. But at this time, we didn't know it. And so I got all these kids, we all carried this boat all the way up to the top. We begged these people, they wouldn't go out there, they wouldn't lend us their boats, so we loaded up, and the six of us, we got right out on the tongue, and we drifted right down, pulled in an eddy, picked four of these people up. . . .
Edwards: With paddles?
Smith: With paddles. And these kids didn't know how to paddle. I didn't know how to paddle captain. We didn't know if we were going to turn over when we hit the eddy fence or anything. But we said, "What else can we do?" And we got six of them, and then we got back out into the current, made it over to the side at the bottom, carried it back up, and we got the other people just as the water was coming right up to the top of the rocks, and we got them back. The water completely pulled the entire snout boat underneath the river. And we're walking back, and the people said, "What are we going to do about that boat?" (laughs) I said, "We're going to go on with our trip. We're going to do whatever. We'll just leave it here. It's recreational equipment." (laughs) And just at that point, the whole boat popped back up, came out and floated right down beside us, right into the eddy we were in. We camped in the eddy that night, half of us laying, sleeping upside down on that boat, all the other boats harbored together, and passed food around. I set the porta-potty up at one end. The next morning, we got up in a crack, got some ropes, set up a pulley system, turned it over, went on our way again. But these young kids, and for us having no paddling experience -in those days, we weren't set up, we didn't have pulley systems, we didn't have enough long ropes, we didn't have carabiners, we didn't have the knowledge of how to pull things off. And everybody coming right together. . . .
Steiger: Were you leading that trip?
Smith: Yeah, I think I was.
Steiger: And you made two trips?
Smith: Yeah. (laughs) And some of the passengers. . . . (laughs) Because we got out there and I would start screaming and yelling at these kids just like they were in the army or something, and we'd get back to shore and the parents would say, "You've got to take it easy on that person, maybe he. . . ." I said (yelling like a drill sergeant), "Get up out of the bottom of the boat! Pull, pull!" (laughs) And we were all just scared to death. We didn't know what was going to happen. At the very least, we'd have to take a swim. But it worked out fine. Seeing so many people pull together -in the old days, it seemed to be more and more. Nowadays, it seems like when something happens, everyone looks around and expects you to know what to do -and we do! (chuckles) But when everyone looked around and they go, "We don't expect anyone to know how to do this. Let's all help out on this, let's all support the people." That kind of stuff. It isn't as much there nowadays as it used to be. That's that story!
Steiger: What were the passengers like? What were the people like that were out on that rock?
Edwards: Wasn't there a blacksmith on that trip that helped pound the frame back into shape?
Smith: Oh! Yeah!
Edwards: Tell him about that guy.
Steiger: Just for details, I wonder what the passengers were like who were stuck.
Smith: We had housewives, kids. When I first started river running, it was like a lot of professionals: a lot of doctors, a lot of people who could afford it. Then as it sort of moves like another ten years, we started getting housewives, janitors -normal people used to be able to afford it. There was a period when you'd get all outdoorsy people, like yuppies people who are into "getting into" the wilderness. But nowadays you can have people who've saved up. You don't have to be particularly rich.
And what we had on this trip was a cross-section of everything: we had a few professional people, but we had just regular, normal people, overweight people, children. There was this stacked across the board. Nobody was accountants.
Steiger: (aside about rocking and blanket in background) But you don't remember specifically who it was that was stuck out on the rock?
Smith: Oh, I have a whole set of pictures. There was somebody on the shore that just took [pictures one right after the other with a motor drive camera], and they sent them to me. I could give them to you if you want to go with this. Because there's a frame-by-frame of us going out there and doing it, and there's all of the people's names and everything. Names have always been my worst suit, and I think it's getting worse than better. It's terrible when you go to some ski area or something like that and you set down and someone skis up next to you and they say, "I would have recognized you if you had an oar in your hand," or something. In fact, I sat with one of your nieces or something on a chairlift. Remember me telling you this?
Steiger: Who would that have been?
Smith: I don't know. She said, "Oh, you work on the river?"
Steiger: My cousin.
Smith: Yeah. And I told her, "Yeah, I work on the river." She said, "Oh, one of my cousins works there, Lew Steiger." And I said, "What a small world!" But they always remember your name, and I never remember their names.
Steiger: That's me too. And then you get these ones that really stick out in your memory, whether you remember their names or not. You remember kind of certain things about them.
Smith: I had some guys come down on a trip -there were six of them and they were all on the Harvard rowing team. This one guy said he was going to be a teacher at this girls' college: Wesleyan [I think he means Wellesley, it's closer to Boston], or something. So I got a chance, I was in Boston, at this regatta, and there all the ships are doing everything and I'm walking across this field with thousands of people, and I go, "Oh, I know someone who works here!" Just like that, I thought of his name. The next person I saw, he was right there. I said, "Matt! How you doing?" (laughs) _____________ said we'd never thought we'd see each other again or anything. I thought of his name just about a second before I saw him.
Steiger: Well, what do you think Edwards? What do you think Wesley? You've got to have another one.
Smith: Well, the greatest story: I took my mom down on a river trip. Now this has given me a lot of tolerance for dealing with anybody. We were like the second day or so, and we're to House Rock, and you know how cold the water can be there and everything. Everyone's washing their hair, and my mom says, "I think I'll wash my hair, Wesley." I said, "Fine, go ahead, wash your hair." And she said, "Warm some water." And I go, "Ha! What do you mean?" She said, "Warm some water." I said, "Mom, people just go down to the beach." [And she said authoritatively], "Wesley!" "Yes, ma'am." (chuckles) And I warmed some water for her. (laughs) Since then, I've done it for myself, we do it for anybody. But having my mom on a trip was just incredible. The shit that you go through for your mom and you don't think anything about it, and then you see somebody else and you go, "Well, if I can go through this with one person, why can't I go through it with everybody? Treat everybody just like they're normal."
Edwards: Like your mom.
Smith: I took her up to Havasu Falls -she's overweight, she hadn't hiked or anything -we made it all the way up, nine miles. She goes, "Okay, I'd better start back, my arthritis is kicking up." Her legs were swelling up. She can only walk like little Chinese [steps]. I said, "No, sit down, sit down." It continued to happen.
So I was head boatman on the trip again, and we started walking back, and we didn't make it back until way late at night. I had to leave her about three miles from up, go down and tell everyone, "Hey, we're doing an emergency camp." We're camping on all the ledges and everything there. It's fine. I said, "Hey, fuck it, man, it's my mom. I'm not leaving without her!" (laughs) She kept walking all that night. She finally got back. She set on the boat for the next three days, smiling. She was real proud of herself, for doing it and everything. But I got . . . gosh, you know. And I didn't think anything about it. Now, if I have a passenger that's lost up there or slow or anything, I don't think anything about it. I just say, "Hey, this is how it's going to have to happen," you know. Treat this person like you would treat your own parents. The only thing was, everyone would make jokes of me -you know, like we all do, about this or that. No one could make a joke in front of my mom. She'd stand up for me! (laughter) Everyone would go, "Wow!" Even the passengers, they knew not to say anything derogatory or anything about my mom being like that, and I'd be behind them, and we'd all be laughing as soon as she turned her back. But I said, "Mom! Chill out! Like, people can make jokes!" "They can't in front of me! I won't stand for that shit!" (laughter)
Steiger: Oh man!
Smith: We camped under the ledges there at Rider Canyon at the bottom, when there used to be a nice sand beach in there. And the ring-tailed cats must have just had some babies or something, and we had locked all the garbage and everything up. So AZRA had these striped sleeping bags at the time -all these different colors, and you could just see like about twelve people lined up here like this. The ringtailed cats just wouldn't quit! They'd start their chatter, they'd knock a few things over, and people would get up and turn on their flashlights. Then they'd get on one side and they'd just run back and forth across all the sleeping bags. My mom would wake me up, "What's that just ran over us?" So I'd count how many there are, you know, and I go over to the stove and I get six pork chops and I throw them out on the ground. "Well, the last time they ran over, they all had a piece of meat in their mouth!" Give them all one and they go home. But it was just running back and forth. They'd get in the bushes and they'd start that chatter, and someone thinks, "Oh my God, it's a snake! It's a snake!" "No. We just put our garbage away too good tonight here. We'll open it up, they'll leave you alone."
Steiger: ___________________ bribe them to go away.
Smith: When they get what they want, then they're out of there. That skunk that used to have Pancho's patio, that skunk used to come into camp. I have a friend in Williams, Ted Fitzpatrick: he's on his sleeping bag with a sheet over him, and this skunk comes in there, pushing his nose all the way down like this, and he just scoots off to the side and sees the skunk. The skunk has got into people's packs, they have jerky or something in it, and they get up and they have tug of wars with him, and he never sprayed anybody. One day we came in, we set our table up, all the people are like this, and it's like real early in the afternoon. He jumps off the wall and he just starts going like this. "Mad skunk! Mad skunk!" He starts coming towards the table. This guy is really hungry. They've got a steak, throw it to him, he runs straight to get it, and he's out of there. But he visited that place for so long, and he had so many encounters with people, stealing stuff from them and they'd wake up with his little nose sniffing them. I don't know what ever happened to him, but he never sprayed anybody. But he would be very bold, and after a few years, he would just come right in and say, "Hey, guys, I can't wait until after darkness -I need it now." (laughs) And he'd come in and just sit. Everybody didn't panic and start throwing rocks at him and stuff.
That's the other thing about snakes: We got on the boats one day after leaving Ledges Camp, and this guy's motoring along. . . . We'd seen a rattlesnake on the ledge over there in the morning by the waterfall. Someone reported it, and everyone goes over and they look at it. Then we leave it and we're going to Havasu. That guy goes, "God damn, those snakes don't rattle much, do they?" "Yeah, they rattle." And he said, "But it's hard to get their attention, isn't it?" And I go, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, I went over there and I couldn't make him rattle, so I picked up this rock and threw it and I hit him with it, he moved back and everything -he still didn't rattle. I even pick up this great big one and I smashed it right on him, just right in two. He still wouldn't rattle at me." I said, "You son of a bitch!" He said, "What do you have to do to make them rattle?" I said "You don't have to pick up a boulder and drop it on them." If I'd known he'd done that, I'd have taken him back there and I would have given him a good rattle with that thing. He just didn't know them. People who come up from the city, they don't see something, or if they want a reaction out of it, they want a picture, they don't know how to get it to rattle -you know, like hold its head, put its tail right here, put your finger in its face and you can hear the rattle. But, you know, hit it with a stick! It's like that B.C. comic, "Snake." (laughs) He goes, "Wow, it didn't even seem to bother him!" "You dropped that big rock on him?" "Yeah. He just sort of crawled away. He still wouldn't rattle for me." "Boy!"
Steiger: Can you describe what's been the best part of river running for you? And what's been the worst part?
Smith: The best part of it is dealing with people, the other boatmen, having a life that you can share with people, do things and stuff -interesting people. The worst part about it, for me, is the politics within the companies themselves, and with the companies and the Park Service -which doesn't have anything to do with anything that I'm interested in. That seems to be filtering different ways, and sometimes it can come in and sometimes it goes out and stuff.
But just dealing with people. Once you get on the river, and figuring out how to fix this or how to do this, working together, you know, accomplishing something, watching people laugh, smile, and have fun yourself. That's been the great part of it. I'd definitely say that it has to be the people. The Canyon is fun, and it's great, and it's magnificent and everything, but I don't know that I would have spent three or four months a year for twenty-two years down there by myself, just looking at the Canyon. Not that it's not worthy of looking at or anything, but for me, being with the people, being with the folks, being able to share, smile. . . . But when you get back to town, scheduling, logistics, rules, insurance stuff -that's all part of it too. But it's the unattractive part of it for me.
Steiger: Well it's funny -it didn't really used to be, did it? It seemed like in the beginning it wasn't that much of a. . . . I don't know, it's weird.
Smith: There's a thing about this. . . . (brief pause for technical adjustments) Not to talk about my outfit or any particular outfitter, but they do always talk about the same boatman burnout: "Are you burned out on doing your job? Is that why you're becoming slack, or you're doing one thing or another?" Well, there's times when you want to hike, there's times when you want to do anything. And if you're there for years, you're going to go through different phases, different things. But a boatman can burn out, if they have so much work piled on them. A lot of times, when a company, if they schedule you back-to-back trips, without time out and stuff, you can burn out. And we see most boatmen have eventually moved on to different things, or supplemented their earnings from different things.
The thing that we don't talk about is owner burnout. There are owners who have companies who have fresh ideas, who want to get in there, but the way the politics are set up now, it behooves you to stay owner of a company -even if you don't want to do it -because it's so economically beneficial to keep ahold of that permit, because you can sell that permit. Now, if there was a way that the owners of the companies, when they've had enough of it, when they've had a good life, could turn it over to somebody who wanted to work it -because we can see all of the different stages that people have gone through. And if there is burnout as boatmen or as firemen, as controllers, there's gotta be burnout within the owners too. But the owners won't relinquish their hold on these companies, because they economically can't afford to. It's too beneficial. So then you see a kind of "putting everything into mashed potatoes," making things happen like this. If the owners were under a policy to where when their permit was up, it was given back to the National Park, and they could reassign it to somebody who wanted to use it. Then an owner would not have any reason to stay in the business unless he was getting something out of it, unless it charged his life, unless he was ready to go for it. If he's made a good living and everything, and if he hangs onto it for a hundred years, it ain't going to be worth any more than it is the day he gives it back. Then they could be in there and they would stay fresh and they would be open. But this system that they have set up right now, to where there are so many people that they can sell this to that and that -that distorts a lot of the free enterprise, and the growth too. I do know of people who have hung onto their company, or will make agreements with people that they can sell it or discharge it in a particular way, and they've already made these agreements, and they're doing it solely for cash. If everybody, every concessionaire in the Canyon, when they were ready to quit the business and say, "Okay, I'm getting out of it" -if they got out of it and their permit went back to the federal government, that'd be one thing. Every one of them that gets out of it right now, they get out of it with million-dollar boosts, by selling their user days to another company.
Steiger: I hadn't actually thought of that, but the problem is, right now -and here's a question for you: How do you take these guys out that have spent all this money? Like for example, here's a second generation: you've got like Bruce Winter and Bill Gloeckler, and--- you remember those guys from Relco? What do you do? They're in hock up to their ears from buying Heaton and Fred out, so how do you. . . . If you start saying something like that, how do you sell that to them, and how do you make that fair for them?
Smith: I think that that is one of the most beneficial things, where young people that are coming in and working it. If I had to make up the Park Service rules, what I would do is, I would give ten-year leases on something, up to ten years, and that way they could get better financing, instead of financing on a five-year permit. You have to put so much money into a company. Every concessionaire owns his own property, he owns his boats, and he owns his equipment. That can be sold, if somebody wants to buy it. If he's going to sell it at the right price, it can be there. But if you say "You have to buy it, this is the only way that it's to sell," this would benefit more people like Gloeckler and those young people who have. . . . And you can see this in every one of the old people who've run companies -they run them and they love it. In some of them, there's families turning it over to their children: and that's completely responsible, as long as there's new generations and stuff. But you can get to a point to where a person could give a shit about it, but they cannot afford to give it up, or without selling their user days. Now, they can always sell their property: they can sell their boats and everything. And they can hire their boatmen from wherever they want to, but when they are basing their entire livelihood on the user days that belong to the United States public, when they are through with them, if they don't want them any more, they should not be able to sell them for a million dollars. They should say, "I'm walking away from this, and I'm selling my equity in my property over here, and here, government, you reassign these days." Because those days should be for the people. It should not be for these twenty-two groups to be here forever. It was never written in the law of the land that these people have the singulatory right to jurisdiction over these days forever. If someone is burnt out and they want out of the business, they still won't get out because they can't afford to give up that money.
Steiger: Okay, but the problem is, we haven't started -and I'm asking, because I really want. . . . It's still, though, because we're not starting from Square One -what do you do with these guys, like the guys that are in now that paid, like Bruce and Bill. I don't know what it is -they're probably up a couple of a million, probably more, probably 2-3 million dollars in the hole. If we stand up there right now and say, "Hey, these guys shouldn't own these companies," how do you make it. . . .
Smith: No, we don't say that.
Steiger: ___________ can't sell them. But if the Park says to them right now they can't sell them and they're already at a million dollars, How do you take them out? what they had to pay to get in?
Smith: What they can do is, they can be given a permit. Now, their million dollars that's invested is invested in property, and in boats and stuff like that. They should always be able to sell that on the open market, somewhere, so that's not done. But the money that they make above and besides that, that comes from the Park and having this permit -I think that those guys ought to be allowed, and given more money. I think that anybody who is interested in owning a river company and willing to put it into it, I'm saying that there is burnout between owners, as there is in boatmen, and there is no checks about it. I think young people -Bruce and those guys -whatever they have, if they have enough time and they can make enough money, their property and stuff is going to be worth. . . . And if their permit was ever denied to them -I don't know why it should be, as long as they have the enthusiasm. The Park Service can look at this, but they can take people who could care less about the company, and you know. . . . If you know someone's being completely -gutting the public, not giving services, or is not a good person -the Park Service should be able to say, "Hey, we're not going to renew your contract." If you're totally into it, it can be renewed forever. The profit off of that, those guys can make, their things can be paid for. If they decide that they want to sell their company, if they've made enough money and everything and they say, "Well, now we want to forget this and we want to turn it over to somebody else. We're going to get out of it, we've had enough. We want to sell it." Now, the Park Service sells the days, and there's going to be someone who has a company and says, "Hey, we'll sell you our land, our boats, and all the stuff. We've got it all set up." They can get their money back out of that. And that way, it can be done. But if they set there and say, "Well, we'll reward you, even though you want to get out of here, but you know that you've got this permit and it's going to be forever yours," they'll set there and they'll dabble in it, and then they'll eventually fuck it up. And I think that they ought to be able to be allowed to be there, but there ought to be some kind of safeguard. And the way that it could be, is, like you have the right to graze on this land -you don't have the rights to the land. If your cows can go out there and eat the bushes, you know, like for what we say, and you can make money off this and we can, then everything's square. But when you're through using the land, the land is ours, it belongs to the federal government. You don't sell your grazing rights to another farm -they go back to the government, and it can give it to whoever it feels like. But once you get the rights on it, then what's to check? What's going to ever make an owner -no matter even if he hates the business, staying in there -get out of there? He's going to have carte blanche on this.
The federal government right now is investigating these things as a result of our selling Yosemite and so many of our national parks to foreign investors. They're reinvestigating their policies throughout the entire Canyon. The individual outfitters say, "You have to do this, because our company's got to look good, or you're not going to have a job." The boatmen are always going to have a job, because there's a need for qualified people. Who owns the company is politics. That's between the Park Service, the company owners. . . . But the company will say, "If you don't do this for our company it'll be like this or that." There's going to be boats going down there, and they're going to need qualified people to do it. If every company was to change hands right now, up in the air, still, all the boatmen would have work, because the new companies are going to need people to work for them. The only difference that it's going to make is who's signing our checks, and their attitudes.
Steiger: How do you make sure that the good ones get in there?
Smith: Now, that's a tricky thing. It can be done very easily: it can be done pretty easily. But there's ways. The way that it is now, nobody has a voice in it. You could ask every passenger what they think. You could ask every boatman. If there's 500 boatmen in the Canyon and you say, "What do you think of this person?" not all 500 people, or like if 499 said, "Hey, this guy is a jerk," then if they don't take all of the guides' information, all of the passengers' information and say, "Hey, maybe this is a clue to investigate this one person, or this consortium, or this alliance," because the word's out, everybody knows who's doing what to everybody. And it isn't hard, and you wouldn't have to be malicious, you wouldn't have to change anything, except take the incentive of the owners to use it as a business, make money, but not to say, "Hey, this is mine forever. And now I'm not in this for the river, but I'm in this for the investment for what I can sell it for in the future." Being into it for that reason alone. . . . (ffttt!) If you're into it [with the attitude], "Hey, I want to run a good river running company. This is what I want to do, this is where I want to be. I don't care about the future, I'm not selling it for that, I want to do it because it's here." That's one thing. But to say that you're in it and say, "Hey, I could give a shit about that, I'm in it for what I can sell it for," which a corporation like Del Webb, buying different companies and everything -are you going to tell me that they really care about giving trips to people?! Or are they in it to make money? Now, if they can hold this thing, and they can sell their river days to any river company, that's why they're in it. They're in it for the money -they're not in it for the fucking river, they're not in it for the people, they're not in it for any other thing than to make money. By taking that one thing away from these people, then you would find out who the owners are that want to be there and want to do it. And a lot of the others, they'll get on with their lives, and they'll do what they were going to do anyway. And then you will see these companies, the relationships between the boatmen and the passengers -like what got us onto this -it didn't seem like there used to be so much argumentation between the boatmen and the staffing and all of this. That never even existed! It never existed. Then all of a sudden they get another secretary, and they get something, and they've got to have people and everything, and then half of your life is consumed with dealing with what's going on off the river, instead of what's on the river. And the more professional that these guys get, or the more rules they get to protect themselves, it isn't going to weed out any bad ones -it's going to encourage them to stay in there, to make a buck.
Edwards: I kind of hope we don't hear any of this! (everybody laughs)
Steiger: I had never heard that idea expressed quite like that. I wish you wouldn't be so logical, Wesley! I mean, I just think about even publishing this -God, that'd piss them off!
Edwards: Oh! You're telling me!
Smith: Oh, they'll just crank it up to me being an alcoholic.
Steiger: Oh, I don't know about that.
Edwards: You've got some really good points. I feel a little differently about who's going down the river: only wealthy people go down the river now. I think the river belongs to the American people. I think the Park belongs to the American people.
Smith: Is this still on?
Edwards: Yeah.
Smith: We can turn it off for a second.
[END OF INTERVIEW]